Speed Dating!

It was so cute!! I had five periods of classes in doing the ‘Speed Dating with Books’. Adorable! We took the two carts I had put together yesterday and stacked about eight books on each table. Then each student had to pick a book, write down title and author. Then read for two minutes, the jacket blurb, any reviews, then read some of the pages. Then write their own feelings about the book, a yes, I would read this, or no, not my style. The students were so engaged! It was awesome! I loved it! While they did that, I finished getting the new books ready to go out. Had to cover the paperbacks as well. But they are all done. Packed up five boxes of the discarded books. Finished reading Stonebird. Then started putting the books we had pulled that hadn’t gotten checked out. Then I remembered that we had a parent meeting in the library tonight with our 6th grade open house and really cleaned up the shelves, displaying new books, tightening up the shelves so it would look really spiffy tonight. Glad I remembered so the library would look its best! I think it does!

Last Order In

Came in to find four boxes of books waiting for me! Yeah! I was so hoping my last order would be in! But first, I sent out an email about where/who the Chrome carts are out for the week. Went through all the clipboards and sent that out. Had a teacher ask about speed dating books. Asked if I could get together books for her students for tomorrow. Her aide picked two cart shelves full and I did six shelves. So many great books! I also asked the librarian at Sprague for help with that and she sent me how speed dating can work so I sent that on to the teacher. Tomorrow should be fun! Helped reset students. Logged in an absence for next Monday and Tuesday for my hubby’s knee surgery. Got my favorite sub to snag it. Made some posters for the front office and got them to her. Then I played with my new books! I’m so happy when I get to get the new books out there! Stripped them and put in date due slips on some of the hardbacks today. A great day! Have I ever mentioned I love my job?

Wrong Pathway

Yes, I was so sure that I was to meet up at the West Salem Roth’s I got up early, had my trailer for the weekend all hitched up and got a great parking space so I could head to the coast after it was done since I only had to do a pathway today. Didn’t find my name on the sheet, checked my email and rats! It was way over by Costco! Oh well. The heading on the screen said Striving or Thriving, so I figured it fit. I signed in, and let my office manager know and she said ‘No worries! Happens all the time!’ So I enjoyed a great session with Chris Moore. Points from my notes:

Listen for what will work for you.

Q-TIP : Quit Taking It Personally

Brain takes negativity like Velcro, positive it takes on teflon.

Deep breaths.

Remember bright spots. You really need to pointedly remember them!

Tea story - you can’t add any more to a full cup (scholar and saint) empty the things that are 

           overfilling your cup. What will empty it? So you can add what you want to fill it with.

Goals are guideposts, not the end game.

Are you a good boundary setter? What is your biggest barrier to thriving? 

What is your survival story?

Remember compassionate goal setting.  

Ankle sprain vs. Brain sprain - easy to see physical injuries - but not the internal injuries

What support does depression get? Trauma struggles in the mind? How do you support them?

Rather than pull away? Hide? Overachieve? People please?

“My healing is a gift I can give to other people.” Own your own story. 

Self care is NOT selfish, it’s self respect.

Surround yourself with those who fan your fire.

Do you give grace to yourself? 

The pain of lying can be percieved to be less than the consequences of admitting.

Kelly McGonigal - TEDTalk on stress.  The belief that stress is bad for you raises your risk of death! Stress is your body getting ready to meet a challenge! 

Caring creates resilience.

www.calm.com/schools     Or    Tactical Breather

I chose to be grateful.

No matter how the school year started I chose to finish well!

Thanks Chris!

Screenagers

We had an assembly today to watch the documentary ‘Screenagers’. So classes were only about 37 minutes each which in some ways made the day go faster. I was missing five aides today. Sent in all my aide grades. They only get a pass or no pass. I’ve passed all of them. Though there have been a few that I have gone back and forth about. Had my aides deliver books today. I put away books. Had both lunches in. A lunch finished the elephant and baby puzzle. Half day tomorrow and off to the coast! But first to help my hubby on his radio show! 

Haven

One of our students who has some challenges came in today and spent the entire morning in the library. He was having some issues and had his staff with him while he tried to deal with his emotions. He’s had a hard time this week, but today he was really having trouble. I figured he needed a safe haven and that was what the library was for him today. He left at lunch. I had a Chrome cart returned to me because it had a key broken off in the lock! I let Mr. M know, and he came down with a flat head screwdriver and turned the lock since the key was in it! He told us that opening that was no reflection on his past endeavors. Ha!! I printed up some track posters for the meet tomorrow and then laminated them for him. Ms. C asked if she could have some books for her room and Iwithdrew twenty books for her, marked them all discard, sharpied the Leslie stuff out and put Discarded stickers on them. I left them for her after school. I got all the new books stripped and date due labels all done today, happy dance!! I put them all in a new display by my window. A lovely day!

Boxes

Got more boxes in today and started packing up more books. I had my aides go down to the cafeteria and they have the perfect size boxes! I knew they would! Got in new books today and checked them in. Had an aide come and print up posters then wanted to laminate. I told her no, I had to do it. When I put the first one through it melted!! Everything turned black! So I checked the paper, and it felt funny, different than usual and I went to get the box and it said ‘cold laminate only’ on it. Every other box of poster maker paper was ‘hot or cold’ laminate. I took the roll and box up to our office manager so she could get a refund. I’m sure something went wacky somewhere. I also am finding that putting up and taking down all the STEAM activities takes awhile at this point. A period (with interruptions!) to set up and the same to put it all away. Crazy, but a good kind of crazy! I sent in my Friday pathway to my manager so she’d know where I would be. I know I worked on other things, but it’s been a long night! Picked up my camper for a trip this weekend, so that made my day. I’m a happy camper!

A Nice Monday

Had to look up my new password today since I didn’t log in right this morning! Lots of emails, helping out students. Graphic novel recommendations going out to the other LMA’s. Finished The Button War today. Interesting! Then I added up how much teachers have used the library for an idea from our IC on who to give my Leadership Trophy to. So, I think I have that! I’m excited to promote using the library as a great resource! Packed up five more boxes of discarded books. I also sent out an email on the library being open all week and which carts were open for teachers to use. I had a lot of teachers come in and get signed up! It was great, for the carts. No one signed up for the library though. But, many are testing and it is the end of the 5th grading period. The students are off Friday and I just have a half day. 

Looking for the Lost

I decided to run a lost books report and go looking for them, and it was only three pages long! Not like the 30 pages I usually have! Then I realized that it was only LIT books! When I ran it again, it was only seven pages long! Woot!! I found one, so that was good! Let me say there was only about 8 per page, so it was all good! I think it helps that I started to automatically send out overdue notices every Monday. Yeah for technology! Heading for the weekend! Meeting Lisa at Heroes Tap House to celebrate her RED letter day!

Great Lunch Options

Loved having the kids in for lunch today. We had students working the puzzle, Rubik's Cube, 3D Tic Tac Toe, Uno, the colored blocks, checkers, Connect 4, some groups just reading, some just talking. Was nice to just enjoy watching all that today. Checked over my 39 Clues books. Put away all the manga and my shelves. Finally got my teacher all checked out from yesterday. We think she just had too many lost & overdue books on her account. So I cleaned that up, then decided to look at all my teachers to see what they had out. Emailed a few to see where they were with them. Finished up the withdrawn books for Ms. P and had my aides take the cart up to her class. 

Happy Birthday Dimwit

Oh no! Woke up to hearing rain on the skylight last night and my first thought was “Oh no! All the boxes we put out yesterday!!!” Well, there wasn’t anything I could do about it, so I wondered if they would still pick up today, and they did. I didn’t hear or see anything today, but I went outside to check the pen after school let out and all the pallets were gone. Yeah! I probably still have another 70 boxes or so to go, but that will be for another time. I like having all the boxes gone for now! Helped students with resetting passwords today. Worked on a cart of discarded books for Ms. P for her students to read. Withdrew books and spent a good amount of time sharpieing out the Leslie stamps and putting on discard stickers. Got about 2/3rds of them done. Also had issues with our student password reset, couldn’t do that for awhile, but I logged out of everything and restarted the computer, and it worked like a charm. Same thing with getting books for a teacher. Another school sent some and I deleted my original request, and when my next request went through, I couldn’t request because the teacher already had the books. What??? So I’ll work on that tomorrow. Last period of the day I had a bunch of girls talking and I went over to check passes and two of them were skipping, and as the one left, she had said she had a pass then said no she didn’t, dimwit. Lovely. I wrote her up. That’s four referrals this week I’ve done and it does not make me happy. But yes, it is my birthday and turned out to be a lovely afternoon so out to enjoy the deck, some bar-be-que and cake with neighbors. 

Loading Pallets

Didn’t want to hurt myself today, so I had my aides help move these boxes out to the pallets. I had each aide only move 5 boxes and I did five for each trip out (six of them) and I was so glad when they were all loaded and I had all the boxes out of the library!! I had one aide who got sick! She asked to sit down and I told her to, and grab a trash can in case she threw up. The phone rang, and when I got back to her, she had thrown up! Oh no! Our security person was walking by, so I asked him to be sure she got upstairs and then I sent an email to make sure someone came to pick her up. Reset student passwords. Ran STEAM during the lunches. My students loved having the puzzles out today during A lunch. I had five students all gathered around! Yeah! I also told two students to stop shoving each other, multiple times, and then one of them shoved someone else who fell. I sent in a behavior intervention form and found out that he got suspended for that. Sad, but I felt I did the right thing. Garten will pick up the pallets tomorrow. I was on my way home and it started to rain! Drats! It wasn’t supposed to. But it didn’t rain for too long, so hopefully the boxes are all right. 

Regular Monday

It was a quiet day. I just wanted to prepare for tomorrow! Answered emails, helped students reset their passwords, a million of those little things. 

20 Gone

Thank goodness we made it! We had 20 teachers and classified out today. That's 27% of our staff. I only wished we had more students than that out! I talked with our cafeteria staff and they held onto boxes this morning so I got seven more boxes of books packed up for next week. Had both lunches in. Almost finished The Book of Boy. Sat with one of our aides and helped him go through the Rubik's cube book and we did it together. I was proud of him for following the directions! I think he tends to jump in feet first, but hopefully it'll make an impact on him. I only have one cart now with discarded books on it! Huzzah! All the others are empty. I still have tons of books to box up, but at least we're clearing a part of the stash!
See you Monday!

I CAN Do the Rubik’s Cube

Feeling really accomplished as I finished off three Rubik’s Cubes today left by students! Considering my first two took around three hours each, I did my last one right before I left work, in about 20 minutes! I’m getting the moves down with the booklet they gave us, recognizing the patterns is about down, now to do the moves without looking at the book! Feeling good about learning and I even helped a student who gave up and showed him how I use the book. I got together a bunch of old things and put in a tech ticket to get them picked up. Had my aides count up the remotes, speakers, headphones and get them all together. Mr. W showed up to pick everything up and had a whole cart full of stuff to take out of the library that had been just sitting around. Old technology that is no longer in use. I try to tell myself that we are not a museum or archival library, but still, sometimes it’s hard to let things go. Remembered I had books up in the freezer, so went up to check them out. They are not going to get any better. Though the water had frozen, it was not going to be anytime soon, or in the next year for them to finally get all that frozen water wicked out. So I deleted them and put them with my books to discard. Quieter day today, had the STEAM kids in for lunches and that worked out really well. Heading out to be with my hubby on his Jazz show on KMUZ. The Breeze, from 4 - 6pm on Thursdays! Glad I get to help out and be with him rather than just listen while I’m at work!

CPR Day!

I love it when our firefighters come in to do their Hands Only CPR. We had four 8th grade classes in today doing the training and it was a lot of fun to watch them. On my side, I was trying to find all my employee evaluations, especially the one from last year so I knew what to talk about for this year on my review! I did find it and I’m pretty happy with it! Should work well with what I did accomplish this year, so I’m happy with that. Finished off getting the Everybody, 398’s all labeled ‘Discarded’ so Ms. V can use them for her PD on the 26th. Gave my aides their reviews back with my edits so they could see them. Looked at more books from my last order since they won’t meet my budget with what’s on my order. Found out we can’t use DonorChoose for the libraries since we are not librarians or teachers. That was sad. On the whole, a good day and a great treat to watch the students get a life time skill.

Labeling & Taping

Spent the day getting all my boxes ready for our recycling center to pick up. Had to mark tops and sides 'Discarded Books' then tape them all securely. Did 69 boxes. It's too rainy to put them out this week on the pallets that were delivered, but next week's weather looks better. Had classes in half the day doing a grammar 'escape' unit. If they got the correct sentence order they 'escaped'. They loved it!

ChromeCart Signups

I had a teacher come and want to sign up for the ChromeCarts for when we begin testing next week. I hadn’t done them yet, so I found my sign ups from last year and got them all ready. They were in Publisher, and I had to first change the week dates on the side, then do a sheet for each of the nine carts. Change the week again, one for each cart...I had to make 6 weeks for each cart. I had one time where it stopped printing, so I had to stop and save, then reopen and it was good to go from then on. I also worked on my aides’ book reviews and wrote them up and got them in my binder for students to look through. Got in a new aide. Had classes in most of the day, but just to use the space, no check outs. Had a sub teacher who needed a link to a video to show, and another who had speakers, but no power cord to play them. Helped them both. Had to cannabilize the computer cart to get the right fit. Had to go up and pick up the power cord from the speakers for the sub so I could replug it into the cart for the night! Didn’t do the greatest job, but it worked and all were happy. 

QUIET Read Day

It was a pretty quiet day all around. Finished covering my new paperbacks. Requested eight more copies of Lightning Thief for a unit in late April. Had both lunches in for Quiet Reading day only. It went pretty well. We also had students coming in to check out books during lunch. Pretty much a quiet day!

Speak

I just got in the graphic novel of Speak and really thought I needed to go through it before I put it out. Even though it’s rated 7th grade and up. Nicely done. I was very impressed. I’ve never read Speak, but well worth while. It’s out on the rack. Got all the rest of the new books out except for the paperbacks. I was waiting for a student to come by that wanted to cover his books so I could show him how I did it. He came during 7th period, so I showed him and I think he’ll do fine. Did some laminating for a teacher. Got the library set for a meeting and helped the presenter get everything ready. Packed up more books for discard. Students were much calmer today! Thank goodness! One more day this week!

Honors Dessert

It was great to honor our students today with getting on our honor roll tonight. So perfect to see students really taking advantage of the education they are entitled to. It was great. I handed out certificates to the 6th graders that came. And I got to see the ceremony they did. It was nice. Worked on the new books today and put out a display on the Award Books I got in. They all got out with strips and Due Date slips and I also made a new label to put in that said they were ALA Award 2019 books. I had a couple of award books that I already had, so I labeled them too. Had both lunches in and had a student tell me I was dumb and stupid. We wrote him up.  I got some other books out there today. I’m glad I ended up on a great note for the day.

New Books

I got all my PermaBound replacement books out today. Had to strip them and put in Due Date slips. Had STEAM day in the library during lunches and so cute to see the students ask to play with the Rubik’s cubes. I got all the stuff out for them and had to put it away. We had the cubes, origami, K’nex bridges and roller coaster, Go and Raspberry Pi were all going. I turned in all my Scholastic money and a couple of hours later I had a parent come in and say I had mischarged her for a book and I didn’t know what to do! So I emailed Scholastic, then talked with our bookkeeper. She was going to go to our office manager and see what we could do. If she’d come in before I deposited all the money, it would have been so simple. Agh. I’ve never had that happen before. Hopefully that’ll never happen again. Sent back four books to different schools. Talked with Ms. K about the Lightning Thief unit coming up. We need so many books. Another whole class set. I had a LMA from another school ask if we had one. One of her students was here last here and said he turned in his book, but I don’t have it. It’s so easy for them to get mixed up. At the end of the day I put another book up in the District Mail and there were four Follett boxes by our office manager’s desk. Yeah!! New books! I got them all out of the boxes before I left but looking forward to book fun tomorrow!

Leadership Award

Today I was awarded the Leadership Award because I helped our school get a 3D printer. I feel like I didn’t do much. We had an email about checking these out from LMSS and I sent it around. But Mr. C, our computer teacher, checked one out, then had it renewed and went to go and check out one again after we came back. Our PA from LMSS had mentioned that he might send a couple out to a few schools to keep there. So when Mr. C asked for one again and Mr. G (our PA) said to go ahead and give us one for the school! So Mr. C asked for one, Mr. G offered, and I really feel I didn’t do much. I shared this picture with Mr. G. Thank you Mr. C, this is what community is all about! Scholastic came and picked up the book fair today. I also did the last money count. I called up to our bookkeeper and she was swamped with track. Today is the last day to get all their stuff in, so she asked if I could wait, and I said sure and will take it up tomorrow. I had a new aide come in and I think she’ll do well. I even put her on the non-fiction. Had a student come in with some help and I reset his password, then we couldn’t get in. I had to put in a tech ring and they came through after a few different tricks. I had to go in and make a different password, tech had to re-enable his other accounts even after I could sign in. I’m glad it worked and hope that he got in and won’t have any more trouble. Again today, a great community effort to help a student and for them to see what community can do when we all come together. Got in a new box of books that I bought for replacing some of our books. Had to take the invoice up to the office since it came from the school library sales account and not our regular library account. I think that’s all. Quite the day!