The Book Search

Our professional organization, Palm Beach County EMA, held their annual breakfast for media specialists and principals yesterday. They invited John Schumaker, more commonly known as Mr. Schu, as the featured speaker. He was completely AMAZING!!! I've been reading his blog since I started in the media center because he reads EVERYTHING and he is a big user of social media so he's constantly sharing what he knows about books. He's a book evangelist... just what I want to be! One of the things he spoke about yesterday was how important is to read because books connect us to one another. Reading books is really terrific by sharing books is a powerful social experience that we can choose and that we can share with our kids and our students. The experiences created by authors are things we may not be able to experience on our own (like flying on a broomstick or finding a squirrel with super powers) but we can experience them vicariously and share them with our friends, fa...

I've been thinking a lot about how to help kids fall in love with books. I've read books like the Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller (complete genius) and read blogs Colby Sharp and Mr. Schu. All of these people are passionate about books and their passion leaks out and can't help getting lapped up by everyone around them. I hope I'm able to share some of that passion! One of the things most often talked about when thinking about kids and books is matching up with right book with the right kid (or adult for that matter). It's really a lot less about reading levels and a lot more about what you connect with as you're reading. So less about data and more about feeling and empathy and connection. So NOT what school ends up being about these days. Unless we stand up. Unless we stand up and put books in people's hands and say 'You are going to LOVE this." So here I am, standing up! I got some new books at school today and COULD NOT WAIT to put t...

We just finished up the book fair at school and I'm so relieved it's over with. It's SO much fun. The kids LOVE buying books and we get to see a lot of books that we wouldn't normally get to see. The kids love to look at the Guinness book of world records and the Ripley's Believe it or not books (although the guy with the snakes coming out of his nose and mouth seemed a little over the top to me) and since I refuse to buy those for the media center anymore, it's the book fair or Costco! But it is EXHAUSTING and busy and I'm so glad on Friday afternoon, I packed everything away so when I come in on Monday morning, we can go back to our regular routine. A teacher from the local university stopped in during the book fair (she supervises student teachers at our school) and she asked for books that could help with teaching behavior management. She's going to be teaching a class at our university this fall and she was looking for trade books to put on h...

The Scholastic book fair starts this week at our school.  I wish I could describe to you how excited the kids are by the book fair, but imagine a fifth grade boy (they tend to want to play things really cool) rushing up to you as a truck pulls into the parent up driveway, shouting "The book fair is here!"  Just saying, at our school, the book fair is a BIG DEAL. Scholastic generally offers a good supply of books at reasonable prices and I'm SO happy that my students think that books are fun and exciting.  I read some research somewhere that kids who have books in their homes are more likely to be good readers (they had to do research about that?).  The magic number of books (according to this research) was 50.  50 books that kids selected themselves in their homes and that would help them down the path of being good readers.  Really?  So in my way of thinking, I need to do whatever I can to help them get books into their houses, not just into their h...