Tag Archives: borrowing

Library rules – Early Stage 1 and Stage 1 students

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Next week in Library lessons, students from K-2 are investigating rules. Classroom rules, playground rules and home rules are being discussed in class (and in the library), giving us an opportunity to revisit the school library rules.

Our School Library rules have been traditional for many years, with only a few amendments over time. They are:

1. Clean hands.
2. Line up quietly outside.
3. Be quiet in the library.
4. Please walk in the library.
5. Take care of the books, furniture and all library equipment.

* Remember to bring a cloth library bag to borrow books.


Robbie Rules: My first day at school (2013).

Keji and Wally: store and display

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Keji Sorted's Blitz plastic storage box and lid

I am really enjoying my Blitz plastic storage box and lid by Keji Sorted (above, from Office Works)!

Don’t you hate it when you send out a class of avid library borrowers, only to realize that one of them has borrowed that wonderful book you were using with the class – or worse, your next class? At least that’s traceable through OASIS Library, but what if they merely looked at the book… and then reshelved it incorrectly, somewhere in the library?

I knew I needed some kind of little table, desk or box next to my ergonomic chair, but this lime-green, plastic storage cube (or rectangular prism) is the perfect height, and is colour-matched to the library’s door trim. I can load the box up with the resources I will be using over the week – books, pictures, my timetable, sample library bags, teaching aids, etc – and they stay safely together until I need them.

Where's Wally? poster rack

As I mentioned in a previous post, I had set up a beautiful display of all of the library’s “Where’s Wally” books late last year but, in the first week of borrowing this year, the highly-motivated student borrowers have cleaned me out! Luckily, I found a giant-sized Where’s Wally?: the magnificent poster book I’d had at home for over a decade, and finally succeeded in finding the inclination to separate the eleven posters within. I had them laminated, made the little checklists into laminated cards, and used the cover art to set up a backup display. My concept is to make good use of the new poster rack we received as part of the BER, and have plenty of Wally items that can be used at lunchtimes. Our library picture collection hangs on two perfectly good racks of their own, and just need a good cull and better cataloguing to work effectively (although the coming of interactive white boards is definitely causing a decline in poster use by the teachers.)

I’ve also found a new boxed set of Wally books with a free jigsaw puzzle included. Now I might have the students outnumbered! Maybe.

Many happy returns

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Returns

Just when I thought I’d finished with the blue paint and textured gel medium, I spent the weekend preparing, painting and varnishing a set of small MDF letters (from Spotlight) to match the circulation desk revamped signage – and to dress up the new Returns box. Not that it needed a lot of dressing up:

Lion and Returns box
The full story of the library lion is HERE!

I’ve read a lot of controversial comments about these BER-standard Returns boxes. Lots of schools seem to be very concerned about student safety when the box is emptied. A platform inside lowers automatically under the mass of returned books, and the lid is quite heavy. However, I never had the thought that the box in our library would be used every lesson. I had planned that, when borrowing recommences in 2011, students would continue to return their books in a pile at the circulation desk each library session – and that the lockable box is simply there for one-off returns, when no one is available to return items immediately through OASIS Library. I think the box is rather cool! And now, even cooler!

As for the “Just Back In!” boxes, these are my yet-to-be-shelved books. The divided interior of each box provides compartments for sorting. “Just Back In!” came courtesy of one of the schools in Kevin Hennah’s presentation on shoestring library makeovers, and when I first used the signage in the old library, it provided an immediate release of pent-up guilt. Suddenly, books didn’t have to be shelved (too) immediately, because the borrowers often perceive them as “Hot” titles and highly worthy of borrowing before anyone can actually re-shelve them!

Just back in
“Just back in!”

STOP PRESS: The picture book, “A rat in a stripy sock” by Frances Watts & David Francis, is very popular at out school. When I bought the book, the shop gave me a free rat-in-a-stripy-sock toy, and our rat and his colourful balloons (painted styrofoam balls and Fimo clay “nozzles”) now hang from the rafters of our new school library:

Rat in a stripy sock

What a difference a skull makes

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Goosebumps
RL Stine’s old “Goosebumps” series of light, punny, horror fiction is having a major resurgence in our school library at the moment.

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!”

Re-orientation week

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It’s been over a week since my last post, but I’ve probably been censoring myself a bit, since there hasn’t been too much new Web 2.0 or techie angles in the school library yet, it only being Week 2 of Term 1. I’ve had a few ideas of things to post, but were they worthy of even mentioning? I mean, do you really care that each class had a stimulating discussion about plastic vs recyclable library bags?

It’s been a week of promotion: especially as to how the teacher-librarian can be a direct influence on the teachers’ class programs – I’ve avoided the “service” word there, remembering numerous discussions with Ross J Todd over the years on his stance about teacher-librarians’ roles.

As each class has arrived for their first library lesson for the year, accompanied by their teachers, I’ve also used the opportunities, wherever possible, to: mention the upcoming Book Rap (Stage 1 and the intensive language class); demonstrate this blog (and our hopes for future school and statewide uses for students preparing blog and wiki entries); direct everyone’s attention to the presence of OASIS Web enquiry; talk about environmentally friendly library bags; title pages in workbooks – and whether we’ll even need workbooks when the interactive whiteboard arrives (eventually); and our/my aim for 100% participation in the NSW Premier’s Reading Challenge… The list goes on.

A fun week, but rather uneventful. And next week, borrowing starts. (I hope I can work out the new system for printing out borrower barcodes in Thin Client.)