Fairly short week for me this week; I left right at the end of school on wednesday for TLA and spent thursday and friday at the conference. Managed to not get sucked into a tornado, but things were a little spooky there for a while in that part of the state. :) If you've got thoughts on the extremely low participation in TLA from school librarians, I'd sure like to hear them, because that's something I'd like to help work on, provided I can continue living and working in Tennessee. The conference programming for school libraries was pretty low, I'm sure because the general participation for that crowd is so low, but I also wonder if that's exactly *why* the participation is so low. As the program was, if I was looking at having to pay conference fees out of pocket and could only afford one, I'd pick TASL over TLA every time because of the sessions offered. However, I think TLA is extremely important for school librarians because those non-k-12 sessions are where you can learn things that help move you forward, whereas most of what was offered at TASL were things that would help you get better at what you're already doing, not getting innovative. So I'd like to work on the problem of how to get more school people involved in TLA, but I don't know what the answer is currently, or even exactly what causes the problem. I don't think it's that school people just can't get away from their jobs to attend a conference, because participation in TASL is huge.
We worked on making materials for a lesson on sequencing to use as a TCAP review with third graders this week, which was fun. I helped Mary Ann make a classroom set of several copies for her library, and then I made a set of one copy for myself, which worked out great because I could learn how she does things and then try out slightly different ways of doing it on my own copy. We started the project because the teachers were coming to Mary Ann saying their students were having trouble with things that told a story (assume for example that this is a story about Tom) then gave questions that looked like this:
1. Tom walked home.
2. Tom ran to the barn.
3. Tom fell asleep.
4. Tom ate breakfast.
What is the correct order of events in the story?
a) 1324
b) 2431
c) 4213
d) 3241
The kids were having a lot of trouble using the numbers to label the events and then putting them in something other than numerical order. So we took file folders and put cover art using real books (so that it was also a literature lesson) on the front, then opened the inside and put a typed copy of the text of the story on the left side side and a sheet on the right with numbered events and questions about them, phrased as closely to the TCAP questions as we could get them. Then on the back we put envelopes. We made little strips of paper with the numbered events on them that the kids could physically move into the right order, and that way they had a tactile and visual way of putting them into sequence to help them answer the questions, and the strips were kept in the envelopes on the back. We also put answer keys on them, and that was the main change I made when my set; Mary Ann pasted them on backs of the folders, but I wanted to try a way to cover them and make cheating harder, so I made little tri-fold construction paper things with the answers inside and put them in the envelopes along with the event strips. We made three copies each of ten stories that way.
Then for the actual lessons we started with a whole group reading "Where the Wild Things Are" aloud, then did a practice set using giant-sized event strips that kids stood up and held and moved around into order, so that everybody did one together. Then we put them at tables with five folders at each table and let them practice with partners. They could work at their own pace, check themselves with the answer keys, and then just move on to another folder for as much time as we had. If they were to run out of folders on the table (nobody did in the 45 minute class period), they could move to a table with a different set of five (we split the ten stories into A and B sets to make it easier to make sure we were getting them to different sets of stories). The kids worked together really well and seemed to benefit from the practice, so we're waiting to hear back from teachers about whether they're seeing any improvement.
That's a really long discourse on those folders, but they are going to be a super useful way to make lesson materials that can be used every year (we laminated everything to last longer), and anybody's welcome to holler at me if they want to come see my set. Just wanted to share.
Other than that, I've been working on a program to use my flute to help tell some stories. We were originally hoping to market this as an afternoon thing teachers could sign up for to give their kids a mental break after TCAP testing in the mornings, but the teachers are actually signing up for real lessons during those afternoons (which seems like too little too late, because they haven't been signing up much at all in the last two weeks), so we'll see if and when anybody wants to come in for just some music and stories. Maybe it can make a post-TCAP treat for somebody.
Friday, May 1, 2009
student teaching week twelve
I started at Brickey-McCloud Elementary this week with Mary Ann Taylor, and I'm really enjoying it so far! Brickey has nearly 1100 students, and it's pretty affluent, almost none on free/reduced lunch. The affluence means pretty much zero discipline problems, lots of involved parents, astronomical PTO donations to the AR fund, full-color photos on all handouts at the staff meeting, parent notes coming back with library books instructing the library staff on whether books are appropriate for certain age groups, girls with Vera Bradley backpacks in the latest colors of every season, collective astonishment at the existence of a few students who aren't meeting their benchmark goals, a morning parent drop-off line that takes nearly as much time to sit through as it takes me to drive the 10 miles to get there, and other things that are completely foreign to my prior experience. It's a very nice place, just different from my much-loved little West View! I am learning how it works and how to fit in. I reckon I'm glad to have started in inner-city schools before I got here, because I feel like that might be a little easier adjustment than the other way around.
The size of the school, which allows for a full-time assistant (Kellie), makes the daily schedule a bit of a zoo. K-2 have a set weekly rotation, where Mary Ann gets them in and out in shifts. After she reads and does her lesson with a class for about half an hour, she lets them loose to go find books and check out with Kellie; in the meantime, she's already got the next class in place. That means she doesn't get to spend as much time helping directly with book selection, but with nine kindergartens, eight 1st grades, and nine 2nd grades, that's how she's got to do it to make sure they can all have time every week. While all that happens, there's also open access going on, which another librarian at a big school told me is sort of mandatory to justify funding the library assistant. They circulate about 300 books by 11:00 on a daily basis, and with a few teachers' checkouts, they actually had done 573 by 11:00 on monday. Then after 11:00 they have flex scheduling, where normally they'll have classes signing up for various lessons. Mary Ann says they don't have too many problems with people not signing up, that they generally have nine classes a day in there, but right now the afternoons are very quiet because grades 3-5 are staying in the classrooms beating up on TCAP review. A couple of third grades have been coming in for some lessons on story elements, which is one of those TCAP concepts, and Mary Ann and I are working on a lesson right now on story sequencing for next week, which is also a third grade TCAP topic that the teachers are all excited about letting someone else do. :) I'm planning a short-ish program using stories and flute for the week of TCAPS, that teachers can sign up for in the afternoons after testing to give their kids a mental break (as well as get a little mythology and folk tales in, which is my sneaky curriculum).
This week on tuesday afternoon was an AR reward activity. Mary Ann has found that with an affluent community like this, being able to spend points on little things is really not a motivator. So instead, she plans fun activities that will get them out of class once per nine weeks, and she uses STAR to set individual goals for each student, and every student that meets their goal for the nine weeks gets to take part in the activity. Tuesday was the last day of this one (the other days were last week), and we had the first graders in in shifts. They'd taken photos of all the kids who got to come, and they gave them these little wooden boxes with a wire twisted to be one of those wiry picture holders, so the kids got to decorate the boxes with markers and then put their pictures in them to take home. For the last nine weeks the reward is going to be an ice cream party with the principals (school nutrition-approved ice cream products, ordered from the cafeteria), and then there's a final reward for kids who've met their goal every nine weeks to have lunch with the principals.
So this week I've watched Mary Ann a lot (partly to see her lessons and partly to see how classroom management works with a very different group than what I'm used to), worked circulation a whole lot, helped with the AR activity, and we've started the AV inventory, which we're working on kind of in dribbles as we have little chunks of time. She's trying to take advantage of the currently quiet afternoons to get ahead on that.
The size of the school, which allows for a full-time assistant (Kellie), makes the daily schedule a bit of a zoo. K-2 have a set weekly rotation, where Mary Ann gets them in and out in shifts. After she reads and does her lesson with a class for about half an hour, she lets them loose to go find books and check out with Kellie; in the meantime, she's already got the next class in place. That means she doesn't get to spend as much time helping directly with book selection, but with nine kindergartens, eight 1st grades, and nine 2nd grades, that's how she's got to do it to make sure they can all have time every week. While all that happens, there's also open access going on, which another librarian at a big school told me is sort of mandatory to justify funding the library assistant. They circulate about 300 books by 11:00 on a daily basis, and with a few teachers' checkouts, they actually had done 573 by 11:00 on monday. Then after 11:00 they have flex scheduling, where normally they'll have classes signing up for various lessons. Mary Ann says they don't have too many problems with people not signing up, that they generally have nine classes a day in there, but right now the afternoons are very quiet because grades 3-5 are staying in the classrooms beating up on TCAP review. A couple of third grades have been coming in for some lessons on story elements, which is one of those TCAP concepts, and Mary Ann and I are working on a lesson right now on story sequencing for next week, which is also a third grade TCAP topic that the teachers are all excited about letting someone else do. :) I'm planning a short-ish program using stories and flute for the week of TCAPS, that teachers can sign up for in the afternoons after testing to give their kids a mental break (as well as get a little mythology and folk tales in, which is my sneaky curriculum).
This week on tuesday afternoon was an AR reward activity. Mary Ann has found that with an affluent community like this, being able to spend points on little things is really not a motivator. So instead, she plans fun activities that will get them out of class once per nine weeks, and she uses STAR to set individual goals for each student, and every student that meets their goal for the nine weeks gets to take part in the activity. Tuesday was the last day of this one (the other days were last week), and we had the first graders in in shifts. They'd taken photos of all the kids who got to come, and they gave them these little wooden boxes with a wire twisted to be one of those wiry picture holders, so the kids got to decorate the boxes with markers and then put their pictures in them to take home. For the last nine weeks the reward is going to be an ice cream party with the principals (school nutrition-approved ice cream products, ordered from the cafeteria), and then there's a final reward for kids who've met their goal every nine weeks to have lunch with the principals.
So this week I've watched Mary Ann a lot (partly to see her lessons and partly to see how classroom management works with a very different group than what I'm used to), worked circulation a whole lot, helped with the AR activity, and we've started the AV inventory, which we're working on kind of in dribbles as we have little chunks of time. She's trying to take advantage of the currently quiet afternoons to get ahead on that.
student teaching week eleven
This was my last week at the middle school. They were doing practice TCAP testing all week, so it was pretty light on children where we were. I mostly spent it cataloging the new books Carole had pulled from the book fair and weeding. Carole is stressing just a little bit over having less time for inventory than usual, especially since she'll be out of school the week before inventory to go to the coolest workshop EVER in Memphis with me (it's from NASA and is fully funded and I'm excited), so we went on a big campaign to clear out as much stuff as possible. That stuff needed gone anyway, and this way she has more than ten boxes fewer books to scan and account for. :) Carole has been at GMS for four years now, but is still having to work pretty hard to clean up after her predecessor, who left her a seriously crummy nonfiction section. Too many things over there are ancient to go around pulling things just because they're way old (there aren't enough newer sources to replace them), so I've pretty much been thumbing through almost every book to see if it still had value or not despite its age, and only pulling the ones that were out-of-date to the point of uselessness. Some of the ancient stuff was fantastic, like a series on what the world was like when a bunch of famous people were alive (John Smith, George Washington, etc.), but I also found some real jewels to pull, particularly in the American Indians section. Other than that it was pretty quiet, no big news to report. Next week is elementary school, so I'm pretty excited about that!
student teaching week ten
Yikes, y'all: week ten is getting on through the semester! I am not sure how two thirds of the semester manage to come prior to spring break, but whatever. :) So, after the break I have one week left at Gresham, and then it's on to lovely elementary school. I really like Gresham in general and have learned an awful lot from Carole, but I won't be too sorry to make the move. I like the kids (who are an absolute hoot in general) a lot better than I thought I would, but I'm growing weary of having them old enough to push your buttons in an adult way and not old enough to start figuring out when it's time to back off. This week I've had to kick kids out of the library for skipping class under the guise of helping us with circulation (we have a couple of those), confiscate a pile of Nazi symbols printed from the lab without permission, and deal with kids who are uncomfortable with the lesson material almost to the point of tears but who choose to cover it by lashing out at me and telling their teammates they suck. That's only a few of the kids, of course, and many of them are splendid, but I'm a little down about it, especially after getting a little flack for not suiting a teacher who asked me for help evaluating student work without telling me anything about what was expected of them. Note to self: never do that to anybody.
This week we had our relay race, which I won't repeat from an earlier post. Most of the kids had a lot of fun, most were able to find their books on their own or with just a little help, and only a few had trouble with good sportsmanship. There were a couple of cases where kids couldn't find books because they'd been misshelved by somebody, which prompted me to be very assiduous about shelving everything myself after each class. This was not a good exercise in letting go of control for me, which is a problem I'd need to struggle and come to terms with before I tried to repeat the lesson in my own library, because I couldn't be an effective teacher and librarian if I was busy being the head shelver all the time. Meh.
Other than that, I've been weeding the 300s, cataloging some new books from the bookfair and an amazon order, taking a ton of fine money (must've been payday for parents somewhere, or something), and working with some AR scores.
This week we had our relay race, which I won't repeat from an earlier post. Most of the kids had a lot of fun, most were able to find their books on their own or with just a little help, and only a few had trouble with good sportsmanship. There were a couple of cases where kids couldn't find books because they'd been misshelved by somebody, which prompted me to be very assiduous about shelving everything myself after each class. This was not a good exercise in letting go of control for me, which is a problem I'd need to struggle and come to terms with before I tried to repeat the lesson in my own library, because I couldn't be an effective teacher and librarian if I was busy being the head shelver all the time. Meh.
Other than that, I've been weeding the 300s, cataloging some new books from the bookfair and an amazon order, taking a ton of fine money (must've been payday for parents somewhere, or something), and working with some AR scores.
student teaching week nine b
Well, the answer is that the camera people are in fact at fault for the cable breach, but it wasn't just a little snip. They hit the entire wad of fiber optic cables with a concrete drill. It's finally fixed now, and we're all caught up with our zillions of backlogged circulation tasks. We don't know who is going to foot the $5000 bill for all the fixing, but since we're pretty sure it's not us, we are not sticking our noses in it anymore. It was quite the little disaster and I'm sorry it happened, but I reckon I'm glad I got to watch it since it did happen.
Other than that, this week we had book fair, which was pretty much as you'd expect it to be. I learned lots of things about money, how to make deposits with the book keeper, etc. We had some wonderful parent volunteers in all week, which was a HUGE help. Scholastic does not hold you responsible for theft, but it's still bad, so one thing Carole does to combat it is she just forbids anybody to wear a coat or sweatshirt in the book fair; if they are not comfortable taking their jacket off for whatever reason, or if doing so would cause them a problem with the dress code, then they can sit on the other side of the library and read. The other noteworthy point about book fair was that Carole does a pizza dinner during her family night when she keeps the fair open late, where they can buy tickets ahead of time for $6.00 each that get them a drink, two pizza slices, a salad, and a dessert. It was a nice but not huge turnout, and it raised only a little money, but the point of it was just to have fun and socialize at the book fair, which I thought it accomplished well.
In other news, I was pretty bummed to hear from Kristin and Lisa today about the loss of librarian positions at Central and Karns. The one at Central of course means they're not replacing Nancy, which is very sad but with their wonderful wonderful secretary they should make it okay. I think I've mentioned before that I don't really know how they could afford to have two librarians and a full-time secretary anyway, with only 1300-ish students, and given that, I guess if I was the principal I'd probably have made that cut too if it saved a teacher. I'm afraid the loss at Karns will mean Jackie Porter, unless her co-librarian is retiring and I don't know it. Sad news. Those are the only local librarian cuts I've heard about so far.
Other than that, this week we had book fair, which was pretty much as you'd expect it to be. I learned lots of things about money, how to make deposits with the book keeper, etc. We had some wonderful parent volunteers in all week, which was a HUGE help. Scholastic does not hold you responsible for theft, but it's still bad, so one thing Carole does to combat it is she just forbids anybody to wear a coat or sweatshirt in the book fair; if they are not comfortable taking their jacket off for whatever reason, or if doing so would cause them a problem with the dress code, then they can sit on the other side of the library and read. The other noteworthy point about book fair was that Carole does a pizza dinner during her family night when she keeps the fair open late, where they can buy tickets ahead of time for $6.00 each that get them a drink, two pizza slices, a salad, and a dessert. It was a nice but not huge turnout, and it raised only a little money, but the point of it was just to have fun and socialize at the book fair, which I thought it accomplished well.
In other news, I was pretty bummed to hear from Kristin and Lisa today about the loss of librarian positions at Central and Karns. The one at Central of course means they're not replacing Nancy, which is very sad but with their wonderful wonderful secretary they should make it okay. I think I've mentioned before that I don't really know how they could afford to have two librarians and a full-time secretary anyway, with only 1300-ish students, and given that, I guess if I was the principal I'd probably have made that cut too if it saved a teacher. I'm afraid the loss at Karns will mean Jackie Porter, unless her co-librarian is retiring and I don't know it. Sad news. Those are the only local librarian cuts I've heard about so far.
student teaching week nine a
Clearly, the week is not over yet, but I am going to go ahead and start my posting for this week because I have a good story. Here is the sequence of events:
1) About a week ago, maintenance people came into the library, told us they had finally gotten around to putting in the security cameras they'd started planning after the shooting at Central, and asked if they could put one right above the circulation desk. We said that would be fine.
2) They worked on the cameras all week, stringing cables all up and down the sprawling school campus behind the ceiling tiles and other hard-to-reach places, getting things finished up Friday afternoon.
3) Just before time to leave on Friday, the catalog got cranky and decided it couldn't find the server. No worries, it'll rest over the weekend and feel better; technology does that sometimes.
4) First thing monday morning, not only does the catalog not work, but neither does anything else on the network. No catalog searches, no checking books in or out, no AR tests, no internet access.
5) After not being able to figure out where there's a loose connection or something that needs rebooted, Carole calls the school's techie guy. He hems and haws all over it for a while, then calls for backup. They hem and haw over it for a while, then call for more backup. More hemming and hawing occur, stretched over several hours and several rounds of backup.
6) Turns out they're able to determine that the camera installation guys cut a fiber optic cable somewhere in the ceiling while stringing their own cables. But they are NOT able to determine where the cut is. They go home, perhaps to think about it some more, perhaps just to take care of other requests. We keep having no network.
7) All day tuesday, various piles of maintenance men with various blunt instruments stream in and out of the library while our book fair is going on. They finally find the cut and get rid of the old stuff, then work for a long time getting new cables strung. The last step is to "terminate" the cables, which we believe means to plug the ends into all the places they should go, but apparently another pile of maintenance men does that. We keep having no network.
To be continued?! We're hoping they can finish it tomorrow, but in the meantime, GMS circulates like 150 books a day. We can check out by having them write down names and barcodes on paper, which is no big deal to them because Carole has them do that with every checkout anyway to avoid the "I never checked that out" argument (though it'll be a big deal when we have to go back and enter every one of those by hand), but our book drop is about to burst because we can check nothing in, nor shelve it for others to use. It's just fortunate that book fair is this week, because without catalog, circulation, AR, or internet, the library is relatively crippled for normal use.
Good times.
1) About a week ago, maintenance people came into the library, told us they had finally gotten around to putting in the security cameras they'd started planning after the shooting at Central, and asked if they could put one right above the circulation desk. We said that would be fine.
2) They worked on the cameras all week, stringing cables all up and down the sprawling school campus behind the ceiling tiles and other hard-to-reach places, getting things finished up Friday afternoon.
3) Just before time to leave on Friday, the catalog got cranky and decided it couldn't find the server. No worries, it'll rest over the weekend and feel better; technology does that sometimes.
4) First thing monday morning, not only does the catalog not work, but neither does anything else on the network. No catalog searches, no checking books in or out, no AR tests, no internet access.
5) After not being able to figure out where there's a loose connection or something that needs rebooted, Carole calls the school's techie guy. He hems and haws all over it for a while, then calls for backup. They hem and haw over it for a while, then call for more backup. More hemming and hawing occur, stretched over several hours and several rounds of backup.
6) Turns out they're able to determine that the camera installation guys cut a fiber optic cable somewhere in the ceiling while stringing their own cables. But they are NOT able to determine where the cut is. They go home, perhaps to think about it some more, perhaps just to take care of other requests. We keep having no network.
7) All day tuesday, various piles of maintenance men with various blunt instruments stream in and out of the library while our book fair is going on. They finally find the cut and get rid of the old stuff, then work for a long time getting new cables strung. The last step is to "terminate" the cables, which we believe means to plug the ends into all the places they should go, but apparently another pile of maintenance men does that. We keep having no network.
To be continued?! We're hoping they can finish it tomorrow, but in the meantime, GMS circulates like 150 books a day. We can check out by having them write down names and barcodes on paper, which is no big deal to them because Carole has them do that with every checkout anyway to avoid the "I never checked that out" argument (though it'll be a big deal when we have to go back and enter every one of those by hand), but our book drop is about to burst because we can check nothing in, nor shelve it for others to use. It's just fortunate that book fair is this week, because without catalog, circulation, AR, or internet, the library is relatively crippled for normal use.
Good times.
student teaching week eight
Pretty busy week at my place, getting ready to have another busy one, because next week is book fair all day! We've had a lot of lessons to teach this week (Carole has them on a rotation with language arts and reading classes to make sure every kid gets in there at least once every two weeks), and how we've been doing it is basically that Carole will do it a few times while I watch, and then I'll start taking over it. I haven't done any original lessons here, but I'm okay with that; I had a lot of opportunities at Central to plan my own thing and just run with it, but because they were so good about pushing opportunities my way, I actually ended up with not as much chance to observe the experts at work there. So I like watching Carole and learning from all the things she does. Plus, since these kids are all coming in on a steady rotation, it's important to me to watch what she does and then try to do the same thing, rather than just making up something and doing that, because I want to make sure all the kids are on an even footing.
Our sixth graders have been learning about Dewey and how a classification system works, and their lessons this week were to give them practice in the concept of books fitting together in a certain order. Carole had index cards prepared with three NF call numbers written on each of them. Each kid got a card, and they were to go to the shelves and pull one book from each call number. At their tables, they then had to put their three books in numerical order, and then they had to work together to put all the books at their tables together in order. Then, one table at a time, they had to interfile their books with everybody else's on a book truck, so that they ended up with one big "number line" for the whole class. That gave them some good practice, and it also made it a lot easier when it came time for us to re-shelve the books after each class. :)
The next lesson for these kids, which follows up on this one, is a relay race. She thinks I'm going to get to see it before I leave, but I haven't checked the date yet. She told me about it, so I'll go ahead and share it so we can all steal these things. Anyway. So for the relay race, she has more index cards, but these just have one title on each instead of three call numbers. Each kid gets a card, and the class is divided into three lines. For the race, they have to go to the catalog, do a title search, write down the call number, and go to the shelves and pull the book before they can go back to their team for the next person to go. Everybody gets a prize, but the team that finishes first gets the best prizes because they get to pick first.
As you may have noticed, the success of both these lessons depends on the specified books being exactly where they should be, which brought up an interesting point: expressly for these lessons, she keeps a number of books on her shelves that will never ever circulate again, instead of weeding them. She let me go pick some more titles that looked like they'd never circulate again to add to the stack of options (I checked in Spectrum to make sure they hadn't been checked out). I thought that was an interesting counter to the need for weeding, to make sure that you could count on at least a few books being in place when you needed them, and I'm probably going to borrow that when I get my own place. I don't think I'll do it exactly the way she does it, though, keeping them in the collection on the shelves all the time for that one lesson; if it needs to be weeded, I don't really want it cluttering up my stacks the rest of the year, so what I'll probably try to do is go on and discard them and then keep a box in the back somewhere that I can put on the shelves just for the lesson, then take them back up.
I don't think I've shared Carole's take on AR here yet. I think it gets abused in most places, and I think when it is abused like that it really ends up hurting more readers than it helps, but Carole uses it heavily and seems to have a positive program with it. She thinks it's one of the best tools they have to make sure students are practicing reading--not building critical thinking skills, mind you, but practicing reading. As she says, you don't have to read a whole book to write an alternate ending to it, or film a book trailer for it, or make a brochure for it, or any of the other projects we like to have kids do for book studies, but you DO have to read the whole book to do well on the AR quiz. So they use it to encourage kids to practice reading, and they do all the usual kinds of incentives, but they don't do anything like turn it into the kids' reading class grades. They have the STAR reading management system, which is an additional component of the AR system, and the STAR allows them to give the kids a diagnostic test at the beginning of every nine weeks to see what their reading level/zone of proximal development is. That allows them to a) make sure they're helping kids find books at an appropriate level so that they can actually enjoy them (every student has to carry an agenda everywhere they go that has the ZPD written in it, so you can ask to see it when you do reader advisory), b) set individualized point goals for each student based on a goal of 30 min reading practice every day at their reading level, c) check in on how each student's progress is going by comparing the numbers, and d) have something concrete to show students when they have to have conferences about some students' failure to practice reading regularly. Y'all know I have found AR very distasteful, but that all made good sense to me, and so I may consider converting. However, I think the success of Carole's program really hinges on using the reading diagnostics responsibly, individualizing the point goals and book recommendations, and having the principal's support that all this is for reading practice and not for the reading grade. It also helps that GMS owns a quiz for almost every single fiction book in the library, and many non-fiction titles, so they're not really limiting reading choice.
Our sixth graders have been learning about Dewey and how a classification system works, and their lessons this week were to give them practice in the concept of books fitting together in a certain order. Carole had index cards prepared with three NF call numbers written on each of them. Each kid got a card, and they were to go to the shelves and pull one book from each call number. At their tables, they then had to put their three books in numerical order, and then they had to work together to put all the books at their tables together in order. Then, one table at a time, they had to interfile their books with everybody else's on a book truck, so that they ended up with one big "number line" for the whole class. That gave them some good practice, and it also made it a lot easier when it came time for us to re-shelve the books after each class. :)
The next lesson for these kids, which follows up on this one, is a relay race. She thinks I'm going to get to see it before I leave, but I haven't checked the date yet. She told me about it, so I'll go ahead and share it so we can all steal these things. Anyway. So for the relay race, she has more index cards, but these just have one title on each instead of three call numbers. Each kid gets a card, and the class is divided into three lines. For the race, they have to go to the catalog, do a title search, write down the call number, and go to the shelves and pull the book before they can go back to their team for the next person to go. Everybody gets a prize, but the team that finishes first gets the best prizes because they get to pick first.
As you may have noticed, the success of both these lessons depends on the specified books being exactly where they should be, which brought up an interesting point: expressly for these lessons, she keeps a number of books on her shelves that will never ever circulate again, instead of weeding them. She let me go pick some more titles that looked like they'd never circulate again to add to the stack of options (I checked in Spectrum to make sure they hadn't been checked out). I thought that was an interesting counter to the need for weeding, to make sure that you could count on at least a few books being in place when you needed them, and I'm probably going to borrow that when I get my own place. I don't think I'll do it exactly the way she does it, though, keeping them in the collection on the shelves all the time for that one lesson; if it needs to be weeded, I don't really want it cluttering up my stacks the rest of the year, so what I'll probably try to do is go on and discard them and then keep a box in the back somewhere that I can put on the shelves just for the lesson, then take them back up.
I don't think I've shared Carole's take on AR here yet. I think it gets abused in most places, and I think when it is abused like that it really ends up hurting more readers than it helps, but Carole uses it heavily and seems to have a positive program with it. She thinks it's one of the best tools they have to make sure students are practicing reading--not building critical thinking skills, mind you, but practicing reading. As she says, you don't have to read a whole book to write an alternate ending to it, or film a book trailer for it, or make a brochure for it, or any of the other projects we like to have kids do for book studies, but you DO have to read the whole book to do well on the AR quiz. So they use it to encourage kids to practice reading, and they do all the usual kinds of incentives, but they don't do anything like turn it into the kids' reading class grades. They have the STAR reading management system, which is an additional component of the AR system, and the STAR allows them to give the kids a diagnostic test at the beginning of every nine weeks to see what their reading level/zone of proximal development is. That allows them to a) make sure they're helping kids find books at an appropriate level so that they can actually enjoy them (every student has to carry an agenda everywhere they go that has the ZPD written in it, so you can ask to see it when you do reader advisory), b) set individualized point goals for each student based on a goal of 30 min reading practice every day at their reading level, c) check in on how each student's progress is going by comparing the numbers, and d) have something concrete to show students when they have to have conferences about some students' failure to practice reading regularly. Y'all know I have found AR very distasteful, but that all made good sense to me, and so I may consider converting. However, I think the success of Carole's program really hinges on using the reading diagnostics responsibly, individualizing the point goals and book recommendations, and having the principal's support that all this is for reading practice and not for the reading grade. It also helps that GMS owns a quiz for almost every single fiction book in the library, and many non-fiction titles, so they're not really limiting reading choice.
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