180 Days of Awesome!

There was a buzz of excitement at Memorial School today. Everyone (students and staff) was excited for our first day of school. Not sure how much sleeping there was in Medfield last night!

Because kindergarten doesn't start till next week, I had a light day of classes.  It gave me a chance to get some work done - add titles to a new book order, a bit of organizing and planning, and time to work on a new bulletin board.

Many thanks Christina Brennan, amazing Teacher Librarian from Pennsylvania, for inspiring me to create this bulletin board. She is one of the many TL's in my PLN (professional learning network) who I learn from every day.

The board is not finished.  We will be adding words, photos, drawings and more to show our learning this year. I cannot wait to get started. It's gonna be…. awesome!

It's Almost Back to School Time!

Hard to believe we will be back to school in just over 2 weeks. I've been doing a lot of thinking, preparing and planning for the 2014-15 school year and I know parents and students must be doing the same. To help, I wanted to share a couple of resources:

Click here for a few free online books from We Give Books  (if you don't know this website, I highly recommend that you check it out):

Thank you to fellow Teacher Librarian, Lori June, for selecting these stories.

Click here to see a Pinterest Board I created called Picture Books About Starting School

Hope you find these resources helpful….  Happy Reading!  

Falling in Love With….

This summer has been fabulous. Plenty of time for relaxing, reading, learning and having fun. I also had time to fall in love with… books written for older kids! You see, I've been working exclusively with young children for many years so I rarely read books for kids older than eight years old. This changed a bit last year when I was invited to join a book club exclusively for adults who read children's books (thank you Amy Short!). For our monthly meetings, we would typically read one YA (young adult) and a couple of picture books, both fiction and non-fiction. Discussions were always lively and interesting - this was a group of real readers! I found that I really enjoyed the YA selections. So this summer, spurred on by recommendations from my twitter PLN, I read many books for older kids and, yes, I fell in love with this genre! The books I read were really well written, had well developed characters and stories that touched my heart. BTW, yes, I have read a bunch of adult books as well, but that's not what this post is about! Following are a few of my favorite summer reads (for kids older than my students) in no particular order:

age 10 and up

age 8 and up

A 2014 Newbery Honor Book
age 8 and up

age 9 and up

age 12 and up

The 2014 Newbery Medal Winner
age 8 and up

Grade 9 and up

2013 Newbery Medal Winner
I read this one last summer but was so memorable,
I decided to include it anyway.
age 8 and up

It will be exciting to get back to school in a few weeks and open the boxes of new books that were ordered last June. One of the greatest joys of being a school librarian is sharing the best in children's literature.  Once again my reading life has been expanded and made richer. I look forward to sharing the wonders and magic of books with Memorial students and staff.

*many of the age ratings are from: Common Sense Media