AASL Exploratorium Session

Ethel and I are packing up and taking our little show on the road! We will be giving an Exploratorium session in Charlotte, NC on Thursday at AASL. We don't think our video or are handout link is working, so I am going to attach both of those here! Hope to see many of you in Charlotte! We are going to be at Booth 46.

Yippee!! New Post! New Idea! Bookmobile!

Hello, followers--excuse our tardiness in providing a new post--those of you at a high school know how hectic the beginning and ending of school can be.

So, here is our new idea--we have been truly agonizing over the loss of our patrons this year--due to circumstances beyond our control. Students have less free time, hall visits are nil, lunch times are shortened,English teachers are in trailers, etc. But I have a lovely book budget, and new books arriving daily. We have a great collection. So, Ethel and I decided last week we would have to take the library to the students. We have a cart we were given when they were discarded from a local store. I placed a nice selection of books on it, and off I went to the trailers last Friday. We brought it back--Ethel decorated it. I went back to the trailers. I logged into Destiny in the classroom, and checked in and out books right there! I can't say I checked out tremendous numbers, but it was more than we have been checking out throughout the day. Check out our pictures!

Did you know, March 14 is “National Potato Chip Day”

I am reposting this blog post from last year. Today we had the Potato Chip Tasting and it went great. Twenty-six teachers and students joined in on the fun. As you can see in the picture, I made a grid on a sheet of paper and under each chip the students found the type/flavor. The cost was 50 cents. For 50 cents, they received 12 potato chips and a bottle of water. The cost of the event was around $43.00.


Well, Lucy and Ethel are way too busy this year to pull it off, but next year we will be having a Potato Chip tasting on National Potato Chip Day. We've had the idea of a Potato Chip Tasting for a while now. The idea came from my husband, Fred. A couple of years ago Fred decided to have a Potato Chip tasting party at our house, similar to wine tasting.

He ordered 12 different (you might say odd) potato chips from Tims Cascade Snacks and set them around the house in bowls with numbers on them. Party goers had a card with two columns. One column was numbered 1-12, the other had a list of all the chips' names. They were to taste the chips and match the number of the chips with the correct name. After the tasting we had lots of sandwich fixings and party goers made a sandwich, and well, we had plenty of chips to go with the sandwiches.

At school I will probably not do the sandwich part just have the tasting. That will keep the cost down. This tasting will have a small cost due to the fact that chips are not cheap. We will also sign up in advance and limit the number of participants so we can better plan. I am posting this over a year in advance from when we plan to have this event. If anyone tries it this March please, please, let us know how it goes and give us feed back and tips for success.

P.S. I want to give a shout out to Fred, who just happens to be my husband and the Director of Media and Technology for our school system. Fred is very supportive of Lucy and Ethel schemes for the most part. I think we scare him on occasion.

Shakepearean Insults

Ok, sometimes we all need a good laugh or maybe a new insult. This website will provide both. Ye Olde Official Shakespearean Insult Kit. I have shared this with our teachers who teach Shakespeare. It can be a quick activity with the students so then they to will be armed with insults like: "Swim with leeches thou frothy beef-witted nit", instead of the F bomb.

Homemade Marshmallow

Our no overdue book reward this time was, HOT CHOCOLATE with HOMEMADE MARSHMALLOWS. This was a simple reward. We used instant hot chocolate that I received for Christmas. Heated up two 30-cup coffee pots with water. Bought 4 bags of cookies. And I made the marshmallows from an Alton Brown recipe. Most students and adults for that matter, did not know you could make marshmallows at home. They must me made at lease one day in advance, because they have to start drying out, so you can cut and handle them. We also borrowed a case of coffee mugs from my church to make it more special. The bonus that day was the reward fell, my accident on a school board walk-thought of our school. So I put some marshmallows on a silver tray and amused and astonished the Central Office and School Board. Never pass up an opportunity to showcase your Library.

How To Get The Books Back

Do you have a problem with overdues and sometimes wonder what to do? Well Lucy and Ethel certainly do. We thought long and hard to come up with a way to reward good behavior and not to reward and reinforce negative behavior. Here is what we came up with. Once every nine weeks we have a random drawing. We are looking for a class with no overdue books. The first class we find with no overdue books wins a reward party. All classes that were drawn and did not win because of overdue books are read this notice. "Good News and Bad News. This proclamation is to inform the class of ________, that your class was the (what ever # the class was drawn) class to be drawn for the (we state the reward) for No Overdue Books Reward. Unfortunately, this class has (state the # of overdues in class, just the # not their names) student/students with overdue books. The next reward will be (state a date)." This has worked pretty well for us. We has had more students checking to see when books are due and renewing. The day of the drawing we make an announcement during class time telling them they only have 30 more mins. to turn in overdues before we draw. This bring in a ton of overdue books. (Isn't it amazing how many student have the overdue book with them at school and still do not turn them in, until you ask them for the book). And it does hurt that Lucy and Ethel give darn good reward parties. I will list a few: Pancake Breakfast, Ice Cream Floats, Christmas Party Luncheon, Hot Chocolate with Homemade Marshmellows. We would love to heard your thoughts on overdues.

One Man’s Trash

We check out classroom sets of supplemental books from our library. Unfortunately, students can not check out a book if they have something overdue. This turns into a sour subject. Students make grand statements, like "Fine, if I fail English it will be your fault". OK, I don't think that is correct, but anyway, I found the answer. Instead of throwing away the old discard copies of classroom sets, I now keep them. We call them trash copies. If you have an overdue, then you take a trash copy. It is falling apart and we don’t care if we ever see it again. Return your overdues and you can check out a book with all of its pages. It works great. The picture shows our collection of trash copies to be given away. There are kept in a back room.

The Gullah Culture

This year for Black History Month we are celebrating "The Gullah Culture". Gullah, Geechee, or Gullah Geechee descibe African Americans who live in the Low Country region of South Carolina and Georgia. The Gullah are known for preserving more of their African linguistic and cultural heritage than any other African American community in the United States.

Our activities for the celebration include an art display by Jonathan Green. Green's art reflects the everyday life of the Gullah people. As a child Jonathan lived with his grandparents in SC where he learned the dialect and cultural heritage of the Gullah culture. I purchased a Jonathan Green calendar and mounted the calendar pages for this display. This was the cheapest way to obtain this artwork.

We have purchased a CD of Gallah music. This will be played throughout the month including the day of our third activity, "The Shrimp and Grits Tasting". We will be serving a small taste of Shrimp and Grits (about a 1/2 cup) for 50 cent per person during all our lunches.

Our students love tastings and while they are visiting the library for this activity we will share more information about the rich Gullah culture and show them our display of books that have Gullah characters, are about the Gullah region, or are by a Gulla author.

It’s Audible

I am a big Audible book fan. I like to mult-task by listening to my books instead of reading them. I read/listen to more than 100 books a year. I always have a real book or ebook on my Kindle that I am reading also.
Last year we (as in we, I mean the Library) subscribed to Audible.com for 24 books. We bought a download of the supplemental books that our teachers were teaching. I burned CDs of the download and put them in a CD holder that I bought from the Dollar Tree for a $1.00. (I only burn one copy, because of copyright. By only burning one copy of the download it’s just like buying a book from Barnes & Noble and placing on the shelf of your library. Yes, many people can use it, but only one at a time.) These books on CD are then placed in the Professional Library for teachers to use in class. The teacher can introduce the book by playing the first chapters of a book to get the students' interest up or to help the students with the dialect or names (as in books like the Kite Runner where names are tough).
To make the books more user friendly I took most of them home over the summer and indexed them. What I mean by that is I listen to the book, while following along in the hard-copy book. I made a chart to insert into the CD holder that tells what time each chapter begins on the CDs. This allows the teacher to play the first 3 chapters in class, assign Chapters 4 and 5 for homework and listen to Chapter 6 in class the next day. This really helps with a long book and/or reluctant readers. This also takes a really long time, because not all books break chapters at the beginning of a track.
We have had an Audible Account now for two years. They have contacted us and told us they they will not renew with us next year. I thought this might because of copyright, but they informed me they will not accept purchase orders anymore. If we continue this we will have to use a credit card.

It the teacher is not going to use the audbile book then with the teachers permission we will check it out to a student.

Lucy and Ethel in LMC Magazine!

Okay, we have to scream it to the world that Ethel and I have an article in the January/February 2009 issue of LMC (Library Media Connection) magazine. Our article is on pages 16 and 17 and the title is "Journey into the World of Manga and Graphic Novels". This is the first time we have appeared in a print publication, and it is exciting. I have always had a griping fear of writing that Ethel shares--so we had to overcome much self-doubt to write this. We kept the folksy style we use in this blog because that is just how we are--folksy and funny! We hope you all read it and enjoy it--it was quite a learning process for us, and getting the magazine in the mail today (author copies) was really exciting! I urge you all to do the same--share your ideas with the rest of us by submitting an article to a magazine!

Twilight mania!

Okay, I (Lucy), have fallen hard for the Twilight series. Yes I am late in the game, but my daughters (17 and 19) convinced me I had to read them. I devoured them in two weeks, ignored my family, the pets, and the housework, and had them all read two weeks before the movie premiered. The seventeen year old and I saw the movie on the day it opened, then saw it again after Thanksgiving! I even bought a Twilight t-shirt to wear to school. While I know not everyone enjoys these books, I will tell you that my reading them sparked a lot of great conversation with not only my daughters, but with students at our school and the other school I serve (both high schools). We have almost 12 copies of Twilight and the rest of the series, and they are all out. We have long lists of holds we are working through. I wore the T-shirt to school, and one of the questions I wrote on our green board for student response was "Who is your favorite Twilight character?". We had tremendous student response on the board. I also have them circulating heavily through my faculty--I haven't seen so much faculty enjoyment of a series since I hooked a group of faculty on The Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon (an adult series). Reading them put me back in touch with my inner teenage girlie girl self. So if you haven't taken the plunge, do it just so you can make that connection--and remember, not everyone will enjoy them. And if you enjoyed the series, I would highly recommend for your Twilighters the book Impossible by Nancy Werlin. It totally rocks--it is well written, has fascinating characters, a great love story, supernatural creatures--what is not to love!

Spa Day! Lunch Time Treat In the Library

Sometimes, I think we look for the impossible and try and make it happen, IN THE LIBRARY. Lucy & Ethel’s latest scheme was to let the students sign up for Self-Pedicures. The students that signed-up got to bring their lunch in and relax in our Lunch Time Spa. They loved it!

Here is how it worked.

We had a sign-up with 40 spots for self – pedicures

(2 people per lunch, 4 lunches per day, for 5 days)

We only had 17 to sign-up, but of this 17, five were boys. All who participated seemed to have a great time. Now, other students who did not sign up, want to know if we will be doing it again.

We set up the Professional Library like a spa with the following

2 foot baths (loaned to us from teachers)

2 metal pedicure sets (from the Dollar Store)

40 nail files (2 packs from the Dollar Store) (students kept files)

Bag of Cotton balls (from the Dollar Store)

Nail polish remover (donated)

Lotion (donated)

Corn starch packing peanuts for toe spreaders (donated)

Pedicure Book (We bought at Amazon)

Towels (lots of towels) (from my house)

Barbersol (that blue disinfectant you see at the Beauty Shop) (donated)

Lysol (to spray foot baths between students)

Nail Polish-around 50 bottles (donated from a Librarian at the Middle Store)

30 cup coffee maker (to heat up water for foot baths)

Big Plastic bucket (to dump water in between students)

Eucalyptus Leaves (for floating in foot baths) (donated)