The Book Search

A few months ago, I was approached by one of my colleagues to see if I wanted to help her teach an all day class through an organization called SEFLIN .  If you don't know it, SEFLIN is a group that supports libraries in Southeastern Florida by providing training both online and in person.  I've taken some really great classes with them and so I jumped at the opportunity to teach one, especially face to face.  Our topic was "Using Technology to support the library program" and we had a blast putting it together.  My colleague, Michelle Cates, is the media specialist at Freedom Shores Elementary, and this girl has got it going on.  She is doing some really amazing projects with her elementary students so it was fun to think up new projects that I'm going to do with my own students.  One of my favorite things that Michelle talked about were brain breaks.  My brother is an occupational therapist in eastern NC and this is something he's been supporting in ...

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...