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

Ms Margocs is back on campus today, getting ready for the new school year!

This summer, we processed over eighty "new" books to put on the shelves.  We get these books from lots of different places:  review books from our librarians' meetings, books from the Scholastic Book Fairs and others purchased with Scholastic Dollars, and free and purchased books from the Texas  Library Association annual conferences.

We hope you are participating in our Beach Blanket Bingo Summer Reading Challenge!  Find that bingo sheet and put it on your fridge so you remember to turn it in by September 3rd.

What to look forward to in the library this year:

• A new orientation lesson for fourth and fifth graders
• An expanded, reorganized graphic novel section
• Read-aloud lessons at all grade levels (those older students miss their read-alouds!)
• Lots of new books, including updated nonfiction!

Can't wait to see our Stallion readers in the library in fifteen days!

It's Monday! What are you reading?

Full disclosure:  I experienced a reading slump this summer.   I finished only five books, though I scanned and began several others, and purchased many more.   For reasons known and unknown, I just had a hard time losing myself in handheld text (with the exception of revisiting one of my favorite characters, Harry Dresden, in a collection of short stories--those, I devoured!).

I did read a bit online--blog posts, news articles, personal interest stories--so I wasn't avoiding text altogether.  And being a deadline-driven worker, I'm sure I'll polish off a few more kidlit books before students return to our library in seventeen days.

Among my recent book purchases are my personal professional learning choices for the upcoming school year; several were recommended by fellow educators.  I avoided reading them this summer, so I've decided that I will tackle one a month starting in September, taking a break during December.

Three books are about self-care for educators:  Paul Murphy's Leave School at School and Exhausted:  Why Teachers Are So Tired and What They Can Do About It; and Take Time for You: Self-Care Action Plans for Educators by Tina H. Boogren.  Self-care is a big goal of mine this coming school year.

Three books focus on reading aloud to students:  The Enchanted Hour:  The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction by Meghan Cox Gordon; Reading to Make a Difference:  Using Literature to Help Students Speak Freely, Think Deeply, and Take Action by Lester L. Laminack and Katie Kelly; and The Ramped-Up Read Aloud:  What to Notice As You Turn the Page by Maria Walther.

The seventh book is these 6 things:  How to Focus Your Teaching on What Matters Most by Dave Stuart, Jr., written about increasing basic skills and knowledge acquisition across the curriculum.

I've never attempted this much professional reading in one school year!  The topics are personally relevant, so I'm hoping for some wonderful inspiration to bring new energy to my library program for my seventh year in the stacks.

It's Monday! What are you reading?

It took me awhile to recover from reading Jim Butcher's Brief Cases.  Not because it left me emotionally wrought (like Tara Westover's Educated); it was such a fun grownup read, I just didn't feel like delving into kid lit or anything serious right away.

But then my son and I went to the public library to get some work done...and of course, I had to check out some books.  No kid lit--I've got a pile of that at home to tackle--but some familiar names and topics I've been meaning to explore:  Carolyn Myss' Archetypes:  Who Are You?, and Jean Shinoda Bolen's Goddesses in Older Women:  Archetypes in Women Over Fifty.  
      

Archetypes, by Carolyn Myss, presents a thought-provoking way to look at your personality, drive, and motivation--and to gauge those aspects in others.  Myss focuses on ten archetypes that tend to define most women, though explains that her book is by no means exhaustive or meant to cast confining stereotypes; we are not completely defined by one archetype or another.  Of course, the same framework of thought can be applied for all people; there's an interesting quiz on archetypes.com to help you gain insight into your own personal archetypes.  I took the quiz, as well as my husband and son, and it was interesting to see the overlap in our results.  

Bolen's book was published more than a decade before Archetypes.  Goddesses in Older Women approaches the idea of archetypes from a totally female perspective, using a different framework than Myss.  I'm looking forward to comparing the two when I get started on Bolen's work.

As for my pile of kid lit,  I'm halfway through another Bluebonnet Award Nominee:  Captain Superlative, by J.S. Puller.

Janey keeps a low profile at her middle school, mostly as a safeguard from the school bully/soccer star princess, Dagmar.  No matter; Dagmar tends to pick on one special victim, Paige.  No one will stand up to Dagmar...until Captain Superlative shows up in a homemade superhero costume, complete with mask.  She disrupts the status quo by opening doors, picking up trash, and (gasp) standing up to Dagmar, albeit with nothing but kind honesty.  Just who is Captain Superlative, and why is Janey feeling all abuzz since her arrival?

I'll be finishing Captain Superlative tonight!--then returning to my grownup books to sort out my own archetypes.  After that, I'll be dipping back into the "Mueller Report"...a good reader always has books waiting to be read!

It's Monday!  What are you reading right now, and what do you have waiting in your to-read pile?