Weeding, Planning, Teaching, and Reading

    I didn't realize that it has been a week since my last post, and a lot has been happening in the media center.  I finished inspecting the 800s section of our collection for the weeding assignment, and it was a good choice for a weeding project.  Of 264 books located in this section, I decided to definitely weed 59 books.  Just the physical appearance of these books was depressing.  The spines were so faded on some that the titles were not visible.  Several had covers that were faded, dingy, and/or coming apart.  A few were really out of date in terms of the content.  An example would be the book How to Speak and Write for Rural Audiences. When most of the books were opened, the pages looked yellowish or had smudges on them.  I printed out the copy activity for the past five years for all of the books in this section.  Almost all of the ones to be weeded showed 0 uses over the 5-year period.  
    On Monday afternoon, Oct. 18,  I spent some more time in the middle/high school media center.  The media specialist there has been very busy preparing for Homecoming activities because she is one of the high school cheerleading sponsors.  I was able to work on her middle school fiction and several sections of her non-fiction area.  Those shelves always seem to have several books in the wrong order.  These sections are the farthest from the circulation desk in the media center, so it is harder to monitor students as they are using these sections.  I also used some of this time to plan a display for the middle school entrance to the media center.  
    Early in the week, I spent more time planning with the third grade teacher for our collaborative lesson on Thursday, Oct. 21.  Dr. Repman came to conduct my site visit that day, and everything seemed to go very well.  The focus of the lesson was property, plagiarism, and note-taking to prepare the students for research that will be starting soon.  The students did a great job, and this lesson is definitely one that I will use again.  I realize more than ever that a good lesson with students requires thoughtful planning ahead of time.  I know that I may not always have as much planning time as I did with this lesson, but I know that the time I spent talking with the teacher about what we needed to accomplish was critical. 
      Also this week I had some kindergarten and pre-k classes come to the media center for story time.  I used a story kit for There Was An Old Lady that Swallowed a Fly that I found in the media center.  The kit contained a big book, an old lady doll, and small beanbag animals.  As I read the book, students took turns feeding the animals to the doll.  We covered lots of skills such as using the cover of the book to predict what the book would be about, sequence of the story (beginning, middle, end), real versus make believe, etc.  I gave them some new vocabulary terms - fiction and non-fiction.  
    
Hours Spent in the Media Center at Atkinson County Middle/High School:  2
Hours Spent Planning the Collaborative Lesson: 1