Today is my last day at Harry Stone before beginning maternity leave! I'll keep you posted and put up some pic's when he finally decides to arrive! :0) I am looking at returning to work the first full week of April.
First off, thank you all so much for funding all of our projects for Harry Stone via the DonorsChoose.org website! We just got a few of the books in this past week and will be sending them to library services for processing.
On the front page, the Dallas Public Library has some great early childhood courses set up. Please visit their website for more information. We might look at hosting one here at Harry Stone later this spring or when school begins. This is an ongoing program for them so even if you miss what we host, you can always go to their site and look and see what or where the closest workshop is for you if you are interested
Audio books, a.k.a. Playawaways, are circulating! We are placing the kids requests for them and filling them as soon as they are checked in. If you need to remind them of any guidelines for using them, please refer to the prior blog post.
New magazines are here! As soon as library services gets them in our system to check out then they will be available. If you need to see what we have that document is posted on the front page of the website. We also have brochures available in the library if you need to pick up one to see what magazines we have available for check out this school year and to see what new titles we are trying out.
Also, please be advised that library services has sent us some Graphic Novels and we have created a little section for those. Graphic novels are by definition "juxtaposed pictoral and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer," [(McCloud 1993, 9) Knowledge Quest, v.39,3 2011]. More simply, they are similar to the Archie or Tin Tin or Spiderman comics you may already know, they just are not typically considered to be episodic like a comic book is. These are highly popular with the kiddos, however, I've not had a real chance to review them and make sure that everything library services sent is age appropriate for our campus. For example, I've already come across one that I've pulled because I can tell by the text and language it needs to move to high school. Right now, we are trying to keep an eye on making sure that only the older students are checking them out, like 4th grade and up, unless it's an obvious title that a 1-3 student wouldn't have a problem with (like batman). So help us keep an eye on that. Parents, I will be addressing this more in depth in a separate post soon.
Finally, so far since the beginning of school we have circulated 5,329 items! We've added 980 new items! And we've cleaned out (remember this is good! we have to clean out the fridge sometime!) 5,169 items! Yay! :0)
Keep reminding the students to work on their Million Word Challenge logs - those are due into the library in May!
Happy reading,
Kari L. Worsham, M.L.S.
Harry Stone Montessori Academy Library