Education Week and The Activities here at Lagerquist!

Education Week is quickly approaching and I find myself rushing to put together this post. I want to inform everyone of all the different activities that will be occurring here at Lagerquist. There are a lot of staff who have worked very hard to put together a variety of different activities for our students.

We decided to go with the theme.

Explore!

Our Hope was to present students with lots of opportunities to Explore information they wouldn't normally be able to experience during a normal day at school. 

So here it is.... Our Education Week line up. 

Explore Birds of Prey-

The Canadian Raptor Conservancy will present in the gym on April 23rd (presentation takes place in the gym)

Explore the Past-

Guess which baby picture belongs to which teacher. Guess them correctly and win a prize (pictures are located in the downstairs hallway)

                                          Explore Music-

Monday April 22 the beatboxing string trio Infinitus will perform in the gym.

Explore Human Experience-

Discover the human side of your teachers! Hear fascinating stories!

 Learn about the variety of human life! (Human books will be read in the library. Students can sign up for different books)

                                                                                              

Explore Ideas-

Listen to your classmates present their thoughts during the speech competition (Speeches will be presented in the library)

Explore French- Listen to and look at French Speeches, Skits, and eBooks– all created by Lagerquist students! April 26th (find the cafe located upstairs in the library)

A Fall Report on our Library

I just wanted to write up a little progress report on the activities occurring here in the library over the fall term. There’s been a lot and I’ve learned a lot. We have a lot to do still to keep building this place into a learning commons.

My Goal to build this library!!!

1. A welcoming, service-oriented, tech-rich environment that is open on a regular basis and that invites students in to find resources and services that support their work.
2. Comfortable reading areas that attract students to books and to developing the lifelong habit of reading.
3. Comfortable working areas that enable different groupings of students to work, from independent learners, to pairs and small groups to whole-class instruction.
4. 24/7 access to digital resources as well as a collection of dynamic print resources all supporting curriculum and reading.
5. An area that would invite teachers, and guests to work with a class or group, with the support of the teacher-librarian to present multimedia or other performances.
6. A place that would provide students and teachers with opportunities to learn more advanced technology skills and create more complex digital products.
7. A place that is available for teachers to work in groups in workshops/lunch n’ learns to build new skills or collaboratively develop new resources, tools, etc.
8. provide a multitude of literacy initiatives and reading programs

Total number of Forest of Reading Books - 160
Total number of students participating in Forest Voting - 194 signed up
Activities for Forest of Reading

• Book Club
• Award Design Contest
• Talks with Expert Teachers
• Voting
• Imovie for the blog

Library Helpers
Currently 17 students come to the library regularly to shelve and restock books and help with maintaining the library

Study Hall
This runs Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday - 99% of the time I’m full and have to turn people away


Total number of checkouts to date - 2971
grade 6 total = 567
grade 7 total = 847
grade 8 total = 784

Total new items purchased by year
2011 - 503
2012 - 788

Total number of items in the library
Books - 2594
easy read/picture - 246
Graphic novel - 210
Magazine subscriptions - 8
Prof reference - 334
encyclopedias/reference - 180

Age of Books
Average age of books is 11 years old by publication year
2004 - 1111 total books published this year these are fiction and non-fiction
2001 - 887 total books published this year these are fiction and non-fiction
2008 - 442 total books published this year these are fiction and non-fiction

Graph Age of books by Dewey system

Teacher Research/Collaboration

• grade 6 research for Biodiversity - students researched and created presentations using poster board or prezi or powerpoint
• group research on Aboriginal peoples - students created a presentation for class on a specific group of native people
• completed Dare Arts cards
• research for grade 8’s completed Island City project
• grade 7 french project to create comics using Bitstrips
• utilized Tumble books
• website creation with live reenactment utilizing twitter for confederation
• recording radio advertisements in french for restaurants
• utilizing ipads and screenchomp for explaining websites for a charity “Shattered” novel study
• utilize computers to work on gizmos for science
• utilizing Imovie to create TV ads for a French Restaurant
• utilizing Ipads to film skit for french
• research project on mixtures and solutions end product was powerpoint or prezi
• research project with students on Canadian Artists
• research project on famous musicians students create a presentation for the class, like Prezi, powerpoint, frames 4, or jeopardy
• research project for migration students are creating photo essays on push and pull factors
• robotics project
• collaborating with me to train students on premier

Upcoming Projects/Plans

• using both the cart in class and the lab students will do research for cells
• will use Imovie to create trailers for the book the Twits - we will split the class and do storyboards then alternate filming times
• students will research water then create children’s stories about water utilizing Storybird
• utilizing audacity to make podcasts in music

6 Teachers bring their classes for regular book exchange

Fundraising

• Book Fair - 250$ - store credit
• Chapter’s night - 400$ - gift card
• Dare Arts - 95$ - cash
• Adopt a School - 500$ - gift card

Major Expenses for library budget

• Purchasing Fiction titles appropriate for grade 6’s - 1500
• Purchasing Graphic novels - 500
• Purchasing replacement book tape - 150$
• Repair books - 195$
• Magazine subscriptions 275$
• Incidentals like barcodes, magazine racks and board games took up the rest

Lessons learned from this year so far

• I can’t let teachers book regular weekly periods for computer use. There isn’t enough flexibility to schedule around them in 4 period day
• I needed to purchase more than 8 copies of Red Maple for Forest - they’re very popular
• The cart is a huge maintenance issue - reliable students should be trained in September to help with upkeep
• Cell phones are too small for BYOD to be useful awkward for kids to read
• The cart needs to monitored every period to ensure everything is back
• If Ipads are constantly plugged in to charge the battery dies
• Netbooks must be shut down with each new user or you can’t get on the network
• Each Wi Fi hub has 30 logins
• The cart is heavy
• Not everyone knows that you can sign out books from the library
• Not everyone knows that they can bring kids to the library to do research and collaborate/team teach with me
• Many teachers aren’t aware of the need to scaffold research so students of all levels are successful
• I have a lot to learn :))))

School Library Staffing is on the Decline

In an earlier entry I discussed staffing and formulas used to decide just how much staffing a school library receives  The reality is that funding for school libraries is in heavy decline. Funding for libraries has been decreasing. Statistics and many different studies say this is a bad thing. A recent article by CBC News discussed a report by People for Education. The report discusses the decline of school libraries and the important role libraries play in student success.

The report by the group People for Education found 56 per cent of Ontario elementary schools in 2010 have at least one full- or part-time teacher-librarian, an accredited teacher who has library training. That's down from 80 per cent in the 1997/1998 school year, according to the report, which was released Monday morning.

Meanwhile, 66 per cent of secondary schools across the province have at least one teacher-librarian, down from 78 per cent in 2000/2001, when the group first started tracking data for high schools. CBC News

Libraries play an important role within the school. It offers a place for work to be completed, literacy to be encouraged and perhaps its most important role is as a support resource role for teachers. Quite often I meet with teachers to discuss teaching strategies and ideas for promoting literacy and content understanding, in their students.

Annie Kidder from People for Education also sites the importance of Libraries in helping to improve student achievement.

Teacher-librarians play an important role in helping children find information, evaluate and thinking critically about it and then applying it, said Annie Kidder, the executive director of the group in an interview.

"These kinds of skills that sort of help kids in what we are calling these days the knowledge economy are incredibly important," she said.   

When I first arrived at Lagerquist,  9 years ago, as a classroom teacher we had a full time Librarian who supported teachers through many different initiatives including the Forest of Reading and a research skills program. She was reduced to 80% the following year and then as years passed the job was again reduced to 50%. It was only this past year that the allocation was increased due to the arrival of grade 6 students at our school.

The state of our library is pretty good all things considered. We have new computer and work tables as well as well as Wi-Fi and a full computer lab available right in the library. We have a supportive principal who believes in the importance of a library and she has given me a lot of freedom to encourage use of the library. Students are free to visit during the day to complete work and to utilize technology. We are extremely short on books though. We're about 1000 titles short for a school our size but fundraising efforts are helping this. Visit our adopt a school site. I enjoy having the library open as much as possible in order to help students and teachers. I notice an excitement in the kids when we discuss books and kids are flocking to the technology we are offering students in the library.

There are many schools that can't say they have this much, I know that but this doesn't mean we can't keep building towards something even better. This is my goal to build up the library to make it the hub of the school.

An Update on the Aboriginal Peoples project

Students are working well on the project and seem to be enjoying the activity. They are productive and are starting to produce some amazing work. I've included some images here of their work in progress.

So far students have utilized the web and a variety of books to search for information, make notes and begin work on their final product. We have taught students to look for info in the books by utilizing the table of contents and the index. They have been quite successful at finding infomation in the text sources we've given them.

The hardest part of the whole project for students seems to have been skimming through internet information to find what they need. Students look for websites that will discuss exactly the information they need. They struggle with the idea that a website might be a site that contains information about Iroquois but that it will be broken down into subsections.

One young lady was rather frustrated that there were no sites that specifically discussed the types of tools used to build longhouses. It took a while to explain to her that she needed to scroll through the site on the Iroquois and find a section about the longhouse and that if she read that section she would find out how they built longhouses. Students seem to have a need for the information to pop up instantly. The hardest part of all of this is teaching them to research not expect the answers to be there at their beck and call.
         

How do you battle that? How do you get a student to start researching properly?

The answer is simple. You really have to reinforce the concept of skim and scan. You also have to be extremely patient. I have found that time and time again I will say to the same students.

"Slow down read the site carefully. The information is there hiding and you have to search for it. Research is like a scavenger hunt. The answers aren't obvious. If they were there would be no challenge to the whole task." 

Learning to research is like learning to walk. First you crawl, then you stumble and fall, but if you keep trying you start to walk and then  run. Research is the same way. It takes for ever to find the info you're looking for. Then you have to read through a site and discover it might not be what you were looking for but then when you find what you need the whole project moves at great speed. The kids will get it we just have to be patient and guide them.

Chapters Night

I'm very excited for next Tuesday night. Chapters will be hosting a fundraiser for us and helping to support us as we build the library collection. On Tuesday the 20th, the Chapters at the corner of Bovaird and Hurontario, in Brampton will host an artwork display by our students. Families are invited to visit the display and to purchase items from the store. 15% of the sales from that evening will be donated to Lagerquist in the form of a Chapters gift card. This is so important for us we really need to build up our collection. Here's the link to our adopt a school . This site gives all the information about our library collection, its age and our need to build the collection we have. Families can also purchase e-gift cards from the site that will also contribute to donations from Chapters.


Hopefully, lots of families will come out that night and help support the library and the work we're doing. I've been going over the artwork and it's fantastic. I'm sure parents will be impressed with the quality of work we'll put on display that night.

See everyone there!

The beginning of a new Blog

I wanted to start this blog for several reasons. The first being that I want the public to find out about all the great things going on at our school and to realize the value of a library. So many people see the library as just a place to pick up a book. At Lagerquist this isn't the case. Students at our middle school can do so much more in this space. Funding is tight I won't hide that but I have a supportive Principal who seems to trust me when I come up with different ideas for programs to run in the school. Not every principal would agree to taking 170 kids to view the movie, "The Hunger Games". Thank you.

As the librarian I work everyday to do more than shelve books and recommend books. I think it's time others knew this. Given our current political climate here in Ontario I think this is more important than ever. In a time and place when teachers are being seen as overpaid, and well a bit lazy because we do not work in the summers I think it's high time people know what we do. I mean what we really do. Not just all the report cards and pushing play on the video we're about to show.

To be honest I would be starting this blog even if I were in a classroom because I think it's important for everyone to know what we do. I believe respect is earned. We earn respect from the kids at our school, we earn respect from our peers, our bosses and of course the parents.

Hopefully, this blog will let all of these individuals see the value of the library and the amazing work our students do complete here at the school. We as teachers are here to guide and help and I won't take credit for the awesome stuff kids do. I just want everyone to know our role in its creation.

Annie Kidder put it best, (She's so much more eloquent than I am), she said "We need to re-embed the value of public education.... The deep value of it. Not just the facts in, facts out value but that it actually changes who we are.... It's not enough to close the (classroom) door and say trust me. That doesn't work ...... You (teachers) have to tell us. You have to let us (the public) know.... You have to help us understand what it is you do and why it's so valuable."

So that's my goal to show everyone what it that we do in the Lagerquist Library and the value of  it to our kids.