Five steps to a Rocking Library the first week!

The new school year has begun, and our library is Rocking! Remember the old days when school librarians would wait until the second or even third week of school to open their library, not the case anymore. To provide access we must be open from the first day!


1. Open the library over the summer with a summer reading program!
We had a chance to open our library on Thursday afternoons over the summer. This was a great opportunity to meet students and their parents before the school year began. On the first day of school students were ready to check out new books or renew the ones they checked out over the summer. Students were able to blog on the media center blog over the summer. We had 300 plus posts of book reviews, and we hosted a Summer Reading Ice Cream Celebration the 2nd week of school for students who blogged!

2. Start your daily broadcast the 1st day of school!
Last year was my first facilitating the OWLS TV program. So, this year I brought a few kids in during pre-planning and we were ready to go live on the first day of school! It was so exciting to have this flurry of activity in the library on the first day, not to mention the chance to pitch our media programs to the whole school right away.

3. Get classes in for checkout right away!
I talked with my English teachers and invited their classes in for checkout starting the 2nd day of school. You'd think they would want to get their classroom procedures down, but their main focus is to get books in the hands of their students, so they jumped at the opportunity! The excitement over books put the perfect spin on a new year.

4. Open before school even on the 1st day!
My doors opened at 7:30 on the first day of school and there were 50 plus kids in the library by 8:10. As classes came for checkout I promoted the library as a place to "hang" in the morning and by the second week of school we have over 100 kids each morning. They play the Wii, prepare for morning broadcast, use the computers for work and gaming, check out books, read, play chess, work on our community puzzle, or just hang out with their friends.

5. Meet with teachers on collaboration ASAP!
Within the first few weeks of school I have had a chance to start planning collaborate lessons with many of my teachers! It's very important to get out to the teachers' collaborative planning meetings, build relationships with your faculty, and jump on any chance you get to offer resources or collaborative teaching opportunities. Our teachers are very busy so it is important that we help them! I'm working on a pathfinder and curating from the Internet on topics related to the American Revolution for a collaborative unit for a Hollywood vs. History Extended Learning Time Class. They will be in Thursday to get started on their research and learn about digital literacy project options they will be able to choose from to present the findings of the research!

What are other suggestions for ROCKING your library during the 1st weeks of school?

Library Day in the Life--cmslibrarylady

A Guest Blogger on One Crazy Summer

Our students have been reading this summer and posting book reviews on the CMS Media Center Blog. I thought I'd share some of them with you. Katy M., a rising 6th grader, wrote this one on the Georgia Book Award One Crazy Summer.

Guest blogger, Katy M. rising 6th grader:

I read, and loved, the book One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams Garcia. It was a fantastic, humorous tale of three young girls who visit their runaway mother in Oakland, California. I, along with the three sisters, learned a lot about the controversial times, groups, and happenings of the 1960's- especially a Civil rights reform group the girls join called the Black Panthers. Through this book, and the Panthers' adventures, I discovered a whole new side of protests and reforms- and the people behind them. I learned that behind any good social movement is a good plan, hard work, and courageous men, women, and as we learn in One Crazy Summer, children! I know that I related to Delphine, Fern, and Vonetta (The three sisters) and everyone in the wild cast of characters, from "Go-karting" Hirohito to Crazy Kelvin to serene Sister Pat. I, and many people I know, love the center of attention, and all the spotlight all the time like rising star Vonetta, pleading for her audiences' full focus. And I'm a big sister, so I sometimes feel the need to watch over, guide, and discipline my little brother, just like big sister of two, Delphine. And, as we want to guide and watch over, we all sometimes want to BE guided and BE watched over like little Fern does. All in all, I got a lot out of One Crazy Summer, and I think it's a great read for anyone's crazy summer- or spring, fall, or winter! I found this story really intriguing and interesting, and I highly recommend it!

Summer Fun

Here are a few projects that I am working on this summer...

participating in The Red Clay Writing Project in order to work on my professional writing and to learn more about language and literacy so that I may improve my collaboration and inquiry projects with my school community; students, teachers, and families. My goal is to continue my broadcasting digital literacy project to include the knowledge I have gained this summer about writing and to include more digital writing and participatory learning.

hosting the CMS Summer Reading Responses on the CMS Media Center Blog

working on my Applied Project for my Ed.S. in the SLM program at UGA. My applied project is looking at the roles of the media specialist and creating a balanced program through program development using the Georgia Exemplary Library Media Rubric.

opening the CMS Media Center this summer for students and families on Thursday afternoons!

I plan to share more about all of this soon.

If you have experiences with opening school libraries for the summer, Red Clay, or program development you want to share, I'd love to hear about it.

Today is also Poem in Your Pocket Day!

All students and faculty are encouraged to carry a poem in their pocket today to share with others. Students and faculty "caught" sharing their poem today will have their name entered into a drawing for a Jittery Joe's gift card! Which poem will you have in your pocket? See Mrs. Hinger in her pocket apron or the pocket sign outside the media center for a poem if you do not already have one. Thanks to all of our teachers that have helped promote this over the past few weeks!

Georgia Exceptional Library Media Program Open House Today

Today is our Georgia Exceptional Open House from 9-11 a.m. Come on out and see all the exciting things going on in the CMS Media Program! You can see our newly redesigned media center. Thanks to the efforts of several teachers, students and parents the CMS Media Center has been updated and transformed. We will have Jittery Joe's Coffee (thanks to the donation from the Googe's) and brunch type snacks as many of our students will present about our ongoing collaborative information literacy projects. I'll post highlights from these projects soon!

Elizabethan Faire--collaboration, info literacy, students to UGA library

--Elizabethan Faire 2011--



The CMS Media Center is hosting the Elizabethan Faire this week. We will be open for visitors Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Ms. McNeeley's 8th grade students have research topics relating to the Elizabethan Era during their study of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

During this collaborative project, the students learned about research and information literacy skills and created multi-genre research papers, three dimensional displays and presentations using both print and electronic resources. Students did their research in the CMS Media Center, online using Galileo and at the UGA Library on two Saturday research days. Please come in and see our AMAZING students present all they have learned on this exciting and interesting time in history.