Reading Buddies

I love reading buddy day!  As one of my 4th grade teachers noted, "Our whole school shuts down once a month to do this... It is fun to see how excited the little kids get, and how motivated the big kids are to be a role model".  She's right.  As I see the kids walking through the halls, books in hand on their way to their buddy class, I ask, "Where are you going?" and they respond back with a huge smile, "To read with our buddies!".

2nd and 5th grader sharing a love of fact finding

1st and 4th grader reading Clifford

This year, writing is a school wide focus and so we thought about incorporating some kind of writing into the buddy time.

A kinder student dictates to her 3rd grade buddy her favorite thing about the story they read.

Jamberry Fall Fun

Have you seen the new Fall Holiday Wraps from the new catalog?  They are so amazing!  Check these out.

 

and look how fun they are actually ON fingers and toes.  

Pumpkin Spice

Webs and Monster Juniors

Mummified and Candy Corn

Webtastic

Fright Night and Black Bats

I am so excited about these wraps that I just want to give them away!

That is in ADDITION to all the awesome hostess rewards you already earn!  Don't pass this up!

Schedule your Facebook or Instagram party here 

Not ready to book a party?  Place a Buy 3 Get 1 Free order by the end of September and get a FREE Pedi-Pack

See the rest of the catalog here 

Dot Day

I love my teachers... they are always willing to try something new or play along with my ideas even when in true Mrs. Romine fashion, I spring it on them.  This year I heard about Dot Day for the first time.  And so two weeks ago, I sent out an email telling the teachers about International Dot Day with a link to this blog  with some ideas and said if anyone was up for doing an activity to let me know.  Some teachers took it and ran with it, planning activities to do in the classrooms, like these kinder teachers.  For math, they read 10 Black Dots and gave each kid a different number card.  They had to tell the teacher the number and count out the number of dots to make their picture.

a snowman

a car

In Language Arts, they happen to be studying beginning sounds, so the kinder idea from the blog above went perfectly.  Students had a paper with the first initial of their name and had to put dots all on the letter.

My 5th grade teachers departmentalize and one of the math teachers and I collaborated on how to use dots with their objective of two-digit multiplication.  We decided to have the kids make a drawing of two shapes.  It could be abstract shapes, geometrical shapes or 2 "things" that go together.  Some even did their initials. 

Then they had to color around the shapes for their background.  When they finished that, they took a Q-tip with paint and dotted the inside of their 2 shapes.  Then they counted the number of dots in each shape and wrote a multiplication sentence and solved the problem.  Then they made a QR code on the iPad with the answer to the problem. 

Finally they attached the QR code to their drawing and signed their picture.  

Now the pictures are ready to be hung in the 5th grade hallway for a self checking multiplication station.  

Technology Tuesday: Tweet! Tweet!

It's official!  I'm a "tweeter"!  I have tweeted 8 times in the past week about things going on in my library.  I just decided to jump in and see what happens.

I signed up for a twitter account last April at our Texas Library Conference when I went to a session about the "Nerdy Book Club"and immediately regretted it.  While I was pretty sure that the presenters, Cynthia Alaniz @utalaniz and John Schu @MrSchuReads, were speaking English at the presentation their twitter posts were in a completely different language.  Full of @, # quick phrases and links to websites.  I could not decipher and immediately vowed never to go there again.  

But then, I came back to school in August and got curious about it again.  I opened the shunned app on my phone and searched for a few of the other librarians in my district and started reading the things they were posting.  Now it wasn't so foreign.  They were just posting about the things happening in their libraries.  After "lurking" for a week or so, I worked up the courage to create an account for my"professional" self.  Then I started asking questions to my go to girls for social media... Cari Young @myschoollibrary and Angie Oliverson (Ms.O Reads Books). (I even FB instant messaged my director on a Saturday night).  She sent me to this blog Summer Learning Series 2014.  Here Todd Nesloney @TechNinjaTodd, a principal and tech guy extraordinaire, challenges his teachers to learn something new every week.  It was great!  I loved reading his personal story about twitter and he links to some other great resources about getting started.  And so off I went...

My First Tweet

Besides informing my community about the things going on in my library, I can already tell twitter is going to help me with my professional goal to network with other librarians and teachers.  

You can follow me @laffinglibrary

Funny Friday: Like Student Like Teacher

Every librarian has probably gotten the questions, "Where are the 'good books'?" or "Do you have any 'good book'?" from their students.

But last night on Facebook, one of my TEACHERS posted "anyone have a good book to lend? I need something to read while my kids read each night!"  

My comment..."Ummmm, we have a whole library full of 'good books'!"

Now I know where the kids get it from ;)

Technology Tuesday: QR Code Orientation

Rather than stand in front of my 4th graders and show a Power Point while I bore them to tears about the different parts of the library and procedures whey must follow, I decide to have them to a QR code Scavenger Hunt for their Orientation.  I made a list of 22 places in our library I wanted them to know about... the check out desk, the biography section, the smartboard, the iPad cart, etc.  Then I made a list of 22 questions like "How many shark books do we have in our library?", "How many books can you check out at a time?", "What kind of books are in the 398.2s?".  Then using the website QR Stuff, I made a QR code with the answer to each of the questions.  Once I made the QR code, I opened an Excel document and pasted the QR code into a cell and the answer in the cell below the code.  For the actual recording sheet for the students, each number 1-22 had a "location" and a "question".  The location was where they needed to go to find the code and the question they needed to answer by scanning the code at that location.  For example: #1 Location: Magazines   Question:  How many shark books are in our library?  The code that was taped to the magazine shelf had the QR code with the answer "62" which is the number of shark books that we have.  I partnered the kids up and had each partner group start at a different number so they would not get traffic jammed - although they still did.  I also asked them to move away from the code to write the answer(since the answer was on the iPad) once they scanned it so other groups could get to the code.  All in all, it was a noisy, engaging, informative lesson where the students were actively reminded of places in our library, procedures and interesting facts and not one of them fell asleep.