It's Wednesday! What's happening in the Sommer Library?

We've had a wonderful week in the library!  Liz Garton Scanlon came to visit last Thursday with our first graders.

Ms Scanlon talked about how she writes, the editing process, and how long it takes for a book to be made and published.  She read us some of her stories, too; one isn't even out yet!  It's a counting book about a murmuration of starlings, and we can't wait to get a copy in our library.

Ms Mensing, one of our third grade teachers, is also Ms Margocs' mentee.  She passed her library certification test! Ms Mensing will graduate with her MLIS degree this summer.  We practiced cataloging this week, and she added nine more books into our collection.  She also decorated our library with Triangle, from the eponymous book by Mac Barnett (see read-alouds below).

We got our first batch of the 2019-2020 Bluebonnet Award Nominees in, thanks to our Sommer PTA!  Signature pages are coming soon for next year's 3rd-5th graders to get a jump start on reading our Bluebonnets.

April Book Displays

Read-alouds this week:

Kindergarten is learning about plant life cycles in What Will Grow? by Jennifer Ward.  It has wonderful fold-out pages for tall sunflowers and pine trees, and below ground carrots.  This is a great book to accompany their science experiment of growing plants.

First graders are paying attention to factual details in the nonfiction book Baby Penguin's First Waddles.  How many facts can they remember after listening to the book?  The record so far is twenty!

The second half of second grade is getting caught up with Triangle by Mac Barnett.  One student thought it should be made into a cartoon; Ms Margocs agrees!

Lessons this week:

The second half of third grade is finding text features in nonfiction books about food webs and sharing them with their tablemates.

The second half of fourth grade is hearing about all the different jobs on our KSTAR broadcast team, and applying if they want to join for next year.  On-camera position applicants will be auditioning before the end of this school year.   Last week's application parent permission slips are due this Friday; this week's application permission slips are due April 12th.

The second half of fifth grade is discussing our new-this-year four-book checkout with Ms Margocs.  The consensus so far is that it should continue for next year, but with more emphasis on wider reading and stiffer consequences for overdue books (fifth graders can be more strict than the librarian!).

Next week, the library will be closed on Tuesday, April 9th and Wednesday, April 10th due to STAAR testing.  We will have checkout only on Monday, Thursday, and Friday.

Many thanks to our shelvers who keep our return carts from overflowing!

Picture by Ashashyou [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]