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)

Creative and Totally Cool Tool!

I am playing around with a website that I can think of many educational uses for-- Wordle. Wordle is a free word cloud generator, and it's creative potential is endless. You can do cool random changes of whatever text you type or paste in, then print the results, or use it in your blog or on your webpage. I am sending this out to our English department, and art department. I am also picturing using it to make signs for the library--make one for the 600s, using words that are represented in that Dewey section. For example:
title="Wordle: The 200s Dewey Decimal System"> src="http://wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/190370/The_200s_Dewey_Decimal_System"
style="padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd">

Are You Ready For Some Football!

This idea came from Ricky. He said we should have a paper football tournament in the Library. We did, and we called it the Intramural Paper Football Tournament. This took very little time to set-up.
Here is how we set it up:
• Made a student signed-up sheet for their lunch bell (we have 4 lunches).
• Made a play-off chart with brackets.
• Set up tables and ran a strips of painters tape down the middle for the 50 yard line.
• Made paper footballs out of neon paper. (Very easy to see.)
• Made field goal post out of a string of yarn tied around 2 full 12oz bottles of water.
• Set up a computer with an on-line stop watch.
• Read the rules of how to play and flipped a coin to see who would kick-off & who would receive.

We played during lunches until we had a winner from each lunch, then we moved the game to 8 am before school. At 8 am busses have arrived and the tardy bell does not ring until 8:20. So winner of 1st lunch plays winner of 2nd lunch & 3rd lunch winner plays 4th lunch winner. Then the next morning at 8am we had the final playoff for school champion of paper football. That student won a $4.00 Nerf football.

Things we will do better next time:
We will ask the PE dept. for student score keepers and a referee for each table. It was too much for Lucy and Ethel to do with sometimes 3 games going on at once. Plus the Library was still open and we had to keep running up to check out books. We will spread tables out and have a computer stop watch for each table so that games can start at different times.

Above and Beyond:
We only had 14 participates, so I gave each participate a small gator-aide and two fun size candy bars during the lunch time games. This was a surprise to students, they were not told they would get snacks at sign-up or I would have had students signing up just for treats. We told them we were carb loading before the big game. We had hoped for more students to sign-up. After other students walked in an watched I think we will have a bigger turn-out if we do this again.

In-House Field Trip -- AUNT ALEXANDRA TEA PARTY

See this document for students who are reading or just finished reading “To Kill A Mockingbird”.

Spicing It Up For Hispanic Heritage Month

Hispanic Heritage Month
Sept. 15th – Oct. 15th

Here is the plan. On a recent trip to Texas, my niece took me shopping at Central Market (a really nice, upscale grocery store). My mission was to come up with an idea for a Tasting for Hispanic Heritage Month. I was playing around with the idea of Horcha (a rice drink). I found this already made in a box near the soy and rice milk so I bought one. I picked up a big box of Galletas Marias Cookies as a possibility. The cookies are like an animal cracker in a wafer form. In the end I decided on Trechas' Chili Salt that is sometimes sprinkled on fruit. I bought a bottle of powder and one of liquid and we will serve it on apple wedges. Food is always a good attention getter with teenagers and I love the idea of exposing them to something new. I will be using the pre-made chili salt in the bottles that I bought, but I Googled and found many recipes to make your own Chili Salt. I will post pictures and comments to let you know if my idea was Grandioso or not. Forgot to mention, there will be a 50 cent fee for the tasting, just to cover our costs. Anyone else have any nifty ideas to celebrate this month?

Student self-checkout

Lucy and Ethel believe strongly in letting students take ownership of their library experience. Once I got Ethel as my full time assistant, we started letting the students scan their own books. I know some of you do this, and do this at an even more advanced level than we do (more on that later). Picture Lucy, or Ethel, behind the desk. Student comes up, gives us their number. We type it in our Follett Circ Plus. Student then scans book (or books). We hit print for the receipt. We type in any passwords necessary for any overrides (like if the book is on hold, and we are letting it go, etc.). The students really like this--especially if they are in a large group. Believe it or not, when we get a whole class in to check out, it is faster if they scan the books themselves. Now, we'd love to have comments from some of you who take this to a higher level--having students type in their own numbers and scan, etc. How is that set up in your libraries? We are switching to Destiny by late spring (wish us luck), and wonder if this offers us even more possibilities here. Let us know your thoughts in our comments section!

In-House-Field-Trips

We are making a book of In-House-Field-Trips that our teachers can look through and sign-up for. With the high price of gas and the difficulty in finding a bus driver, this is a good alternative for field trips. Some of these programs will be free. Others will have a small fee, if there is food or if we have to pay someone to come in for the program. We will design each program to fit into the time period allotted for a normal class (in our case 90 minutes). The students will participate during their regular class period and not miss any other classes.

So look for Blog Labels with In-House-Field-Trip

What's Your Sign?

The Element Encycopedia of Birthdays : Know your birthday Cheung, Theresa

We picked up The Element Encyclopedia of Birthdays: Know Your Birthday up at our local Barnes and Noble. We also have the other Element Encyclopedias that we purchased there as well. These are usually housed in our reference section, but today, Ethel decided to arrange them on the table near our Slam Board, up by our circulation desk. Wow, what a hit! Students are constantly stopping by the table to read about their birthdays, and we have snagged some faculty members as well! Sometimes, it's just the little things we do that shows our patrons how cool we are!

Lucy & Ethel's DIY Project

We needed more space in the Manga/Graphic Novel section of the Library. We needed to move the current magazine issues out of that section and ideally over to the the area where we check out back issues of magazines.

But how?


After a lot of brainstorming, we came up with this. We had the maintenance department attach 3 wood strips to the wall. (I had already measured and knew how many strips the wall would hold. I got the feeling that the maintenance guys did not believe me, based on all the, "are you sure this is what you want" I heard. I showed them the project when completed and they were duly impressed.) Then I measured, and installed 33 small screws to the wooden strips on which the 33 plastic buckets would hang. Finally, we added some labels to fronts of the buckets. There you have it.


The cost of our new magazine display was $34.12. Small Screws $1.12 at local hardware store and 33 Dollar Tree plastic buckets for $33.00. Boards were free from the maintenance department. (I had some wood strips I had found in the shop class, but maintenance said I could not use salt-treated inside the building. They brought wood strips that looked 10 times better than my scraps.) By the way, our Maintenance department rocks. They are in the Library within 2 days after a work order is put in. (This could be because Lucy and Ethel scare them, because they are worried about what we will do on our own. If I call and ask for hand tools, they are there within 2 hours!)

A typical sitcom day for Lucy and Ethel

There is a reason we are known as Lucy and Ethel--we attract trouble, mayhem, and fun like flies. Yesterday, Ethel left the library to go check on a keyboard in another computer lab. A darling child, the apple of his mother's eye, had decided to rearrange all the keys on a keyboard. Ethel decided to rearrange them--and had a technician in the room with her. The lab at this time was full of students and a teacher. Ethel decided to remove the rearranged keyboard from the computer to hand to the tech so he could rearrange the keys. In a previous attempt to guard our computer cords from our dear children, Lucy (me) had zip-tied them together. So Ethel needed something sharp to cut the ziptie. Ethel asked the students if any of them had a knife--they shook their innocent heads--and she told them "and you shouldn't tell me if you do". Lucy sat in the library, innocent to what was about to transpire. The walkie -talkie in the library office goes off--and the person on the other end says "I need a custodian to the computer lab to clean up Mrs. O'Briant's blood (aka Ethel)". Lucy is shocked and awed and totally unaware of why Ethel is bleeding in the lab. She calls the nurse--no answer--which makes her mind run wild with possibilities. She finally gets the front office--and finds out the Ethel is cut badly and in the nurses office. The unwitting tech, not knowing that Ethel should never be given sharp objects, handed her his Swiss Army Knife, she tried to cut the zip-tie--and cut her thumb to the bone! She had also cut the offending zip-tie, and she grabbed the computer keyboard, and used it to catch the amazing amount of blood that was pouring from the cut. (The students in the lab never noticed). She had run into the English department workroom, put her the knife and the keyboard in the sink, bled in there, then ran to the nurses office with her thumb wrapped in the brown, unabsorbing paper towels that only schools seem to purchase. She didn't call Lucy because she knew Lucy would faint at the sight of blood.
Meanwhile, back in the library, Lucy finally gets a call from Ethel. The nurse is sending Ethel to the nearest Doc in a Box, and Ethel wanted her purse. Luckily, I had a teacher trying to sell us Krispy Kreme donuts at the time, and she took the purse to Ethel. Lucy finds another teacher to watch the library, and goes to comfort and joke Ethel about her prowess with knives. The tech who handed her the knife, is freaking out quietly, because his boss is Ethel's husband. Ethel is fine, required no stitches, but is walking around the library today with her thumb bandaged to some kind of metal thing, and she is suffering through the pain. She has found out that opposable thumbs are important--who knew you'd need your thumb so much!
Ethel's statement is that she heard she had to give another state test, and tried to stab herself.

Just another day of Lucy and Ethel in the Library--you can't make this stuff up!

GRAFFITI

I was sitting in a session about Urban Readers at the NCSLMA Conference, (mind you no part of my county is urban) when this thought came to me. Graffiti as Art or Graffiti as advertisement. I grabbed my note pad and started making notes of how I could make this happen. I came back to school and got permission from the Principal. He told me he had been in trouble at a former school for having a Graffiti project, but told me to go ahead with it. So I did. I spoke with one of the art teachers, who said she would give students extra credit for working on the project. I bought a big bucket of sidewalk chalk from Wal-Mart, only to find it cheaper at Target the next week; oh well. I've posted some pictures of the project.

GRAFFITI AS ADVERTISEMENT
Arts students, here is your assignment. Come to the Library and select a Book or Magazine. Then take the sidewalk chalk to the courtyard to make your graffiti advertisement.

The Rules
*Artwork should be in graffiti style
*Should advertise book or magazine you have chosen, so someone will want to check it out
*Somewhere in the graffiti it should say “Check it out in the Library”
*Graffiti can only appear on the ground. No chalk on the brick walls
*Must be acceptable for a public school audience