The Early Stage 1 and Stage 1 students created three more adventures for Bear and Chook and I uploaded the photos as a another Flickr slideshow:

Please click here!

As before, you can request to read the captions while the slideshow plays, or just watch the pictures. They (and I) hope you enjoy this digital story.

Bear and Chook’s space adventure: fun with Kindergarten book rappers in the school library today, as part of the Bear and Chook books rap. During Circle Time, the students created three new adventures for Bear and Chook and we uploaded the photos as a Flickr slideshow:

Please click here!

They (and I) hope you enjoy this digital story. You can request to read the captions while the slideshow plays.

Over the weekend the library suffered a disaster. Literally! Check out the Dewey label: 363.3 Disasters. This is the second time this set of shelves has collapsed! The BER library can’t come quick enough! (And the inspectors were out yesterday, doing the site inspection!)

My school has been playing music selections from Mara’s CD – as the students’ lining up music – for the past month. Today the musicians came for their concert and some of the kids thought it was an amazing coincidence that, with all the songs in the world that Mara could have played, the group somehow knew how to play our “lining up music”!

‘Tis the day for compliments. A little Kinder kid told me I looked pretty today (I was wearing my infamous “Spider-man” shirt), and two more kids from school just saw me heading home and announced they wished it was Monday already.

“Why…?” I asked (a little bewildered, because this was barely the start of a well-earned weekend).

“Because that’s our library day and you’re our library teacher!”

But they also were able to meet Caddies Creek’s infamous Mr Barden (a new resident to the nursing home next door to “Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge”, created during a book rap last year), and a sleuth (or sloth or pack) of friendly bears.

What a great day!

“When will that taxi ever arrive?”

Bear and Chook meet Mr Barden

There’s a Chook in there – and bears as well!

Yes, I realise that sometimes teacher-librarians can be completely left out of a school’s decision making processes, but my two random thoughts of the day are:

1. You know, I can’t recall the last time I actually sat at my desk in the library office. It’s a tiny place I race into, to put a spoon of instant coffee into my cup, once a day, before heading off to the staff room at morning tea time. Or, it’s where I attempt to answer the telephone (which usually hangs up just as I reach it, breathlessly – although running in a long, double-portable library is definitely not good for the brand new interactive whiteboard). Or, I also go to the office to snatch a book out of Teacher Reference. If I do any sit down work in the library, it tends to be out in the main library area, since nobody would notice me squirreled away in the back office.

2. Yeah, send all this hardware back, I say, and make the little blighters do their research on slates, with authentic slate pencils, like in the days of yore. (Or is slate a deadly toxin, too?)

Seriously, if someone is insisting that a big, ugly, noisy box is moving into somewhere where you usually work, find yourself a change of scenery! Create yourself a new alcove, on the opposite side of the building. Very few library desks are nailed to the floor. There are ways around everything. But the key to any of this is surely communication. If you (and your principal, OH&S committee, Fed Rep, cleaning staff and teaching colleagues) have not established satisfactory communication skills at your school, then you have much more to worry about than electrical emissions from a new bit of machinery.

Some friends were recently dispensing with an artificial bonsai tree, and I realised it was perfect for an often-dark corner of the library still in need of a touch of green.

It’s attracting a lot of attention from the students and has been an excellent conversation starter. The K-2 students are actually studying “Autumn” at the moment; I think they are expecting the artificial bonsai tree’s tiny leaves to turn red, orange and yellow before dropping to the desk.

Real Autumn leaves, Bright, Victoria.

He was going to buy a $4 eraser, but I showed him there was a “Jack Russell: Dog Detective” book on the bargain table for $3. He bought that, plus a $1 eraser.

He immediately recognised that the dog was the same breed as mine, whom I’d once brought in to school – as a teaching aid – during “Dog Week” in literacy lessons. (And he once owned a Jack Russell pup, now that I think of it. It didn’t last long, if I recall correctly.) The next day he was still carrying that book all over the school. Recess, lunchtime, even back into the Book Fair. He’d read it at home, the night before, but he literally “couldn’t put it down”. He’s not “a reader”, so it was a rather special event.

And while I think of it. Why, oh why, when students buy something from a Book Fair, do they feel a burning need to bring the item back to the Fair the next day? Not so stationary stationery.

I was remembering back to my own primary schooling in the 60s. I had a great rapport with my inspirational teacher-librarian, Janette McKenny (later Janette Mercer when she married my equally-inspirational Year 4 teacher, years after they left the school). One day, Mrs McKenny decided that we needed to revamp the “Ghost Stories” section of the library, and several of us were elected to create a papier-mache skull, that would act as a scary bookend for the section of old wooden shelves (which had been lined with black crepe paper and a sign made out of spooky letters). We spent several hours tearing up newspaper and soaking it in a garbage can of water, but none of us could remember what held wet papier-mache together as it started to dry.

Mrs McKenny remember that papier-mache needed starch, and bought a box of the stuff on her way to school. We scampered off to the storeroom and sprinkled in the powder. Again, the papier-mache refused to clump together. Imagine our horror when Mrs McKenny asked, “Are you ready for me to boil up the starch?”

Luckily, we found another box of starch in the art store room and a quantity was boiled up, the papier-mache was drained and we began to create our skull. The paper was so sodden, it was essentially impossible to get it to hold its shape, even with the addition of thick, warm, boiled starch. After school, Mrs McKenny drove me home with it, and one of the boys who’d been part of the team at school came over to help me have another go at moulding it. I forfeited a “Noddy” beachball from the toy box and we constructed the skull around it. My mother then dutifully took the board holding the model in and out of the sun every day – for about two weeks? – until the papier-mache had hardened. It never needed painting, the newspaper pulp having taken on a suitable, consistent, grey colour from its many hours soaking in the water.

The skull sat in pride of place in the library at Arncliffe Public School for many years after I departed for high school. Gosh – maybe it’s still there?

I was pondering this old anecdote the other day as I passed a local fancy dress shop and, when I saw the skull (pictured above), I realised how perfectly it would dress up our sometimes-popular “Goosebumps” shelf. $13 for a lightweight, lifelike, plastic skull seemed like a great investment – just so long as I didn’t have to endure the weeks of waiting for overly-sodden, overly-starched, papier-mache to harden!

And the effect? “Goosebumps” books are once again flavour of the month with our students, and have been flying off the shelf all month. Several of the students borrowing them are saying, “This is my first time borrowing this year!” and “My first ever chapter book!”. Maybe I should soon try moving them on to a few other spooky authors and titles now that they’re hooked by the reading bug? But at the moment, apparently, “‘Goosebumps’ rulez!”