I am so excited and sad to start this final week of my
internship! I can’t wait to receive the degree and be available to take a
position in a school library near me.
Today started with a reading advisory project that is being
sponsored by the art teacher and an initiative unique to Ravenel: Artists on
the Green. This program brings in local artisans to share their craft and work
with the students, organized through the art teacher. She asked each of the
teachers to create a giant puzzle piece to represent their area of the school.
For the library, we decided to use some book jackets that were sent by the
distributors to create a collage of reading and new titles. At first, I was
super hesitant to cut up the covers but chose to recognize that the book
jackets would have been destroyed easily over a few circulations and the books themselves already have
versions of these covers embedded in their hard back, shelf editions. Once I
got over the initial “heartbreak” and my own nerves about creating the piece, I
actually really enjoyed picking out some of the fun and engaging artwork from
the book jackets’ front and back covers and inner flaps. To maximize the amount
of material on the puzzle piece, I used the spine labels for the book titles
and authors/illustrators to add reference in minimal space. Overall, the
collage turned into a modge-podge of fiction texts that spans all elementary
grade levels. I titled the piece “Characters Around” as the cover art focuses
largely on a diverse set of character illustrations.
As I was finishing this project, one of the first grade
classes came for library time. Cindy had planned a lesson using the school’s
new Chromebooks to teach these students how to use the online Destiny catalog.
I was glad to see that the lesson was structured much like my own collaborative
lesson with the 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders. The
first half of the lesson was largely focused on learning terminology and location
of buttons on the catalog screen. Then, Cindy used some interactive, formative
questions to test if the students had paid attention to which search button
they should use (keyword, title, author, series) and what section the call
number belonged to (easy, fiction, biography, nonfiction). Lastly, the students
worked with a partner to find four call numbers that Cindy had specified on a
small worksheet addressing the four search functions they had just learned from
the catalog.
Overall, I thought the lesson went as smoothly as possible
for students both new to Chromebooks and still developing skills like spelling
and reading. Thankfully, my presence as well as the teacher returning a bit
early to the library made troubleshooting and answering student questions much
much easier. I think I would keep this in mind when I teach the younger-grade
students something complex or foreign to the students: enlist help! Maybe even
pairing upper-grade students during these lessons would be helpful to the
students. I have seen older students help younger students with finding a book
in just this way. It would be really cool and rewarding to the older students
to mentor the younger students as a potential program for my own library. Even
still, the lesson as is seemed to make sense to the students.
Lastly, I started conducting inventory on the biography
section of the collection. This is the section that Cindy wants me to weed and
analyze for assessment and potential growth. The inventory was super easy to
set up. Follett has a program feature in Back Office that allows you to set
parameters for the section. From there, I went to the biography section with a
laptop and a hand scanner to scan the books present. Boom! That’s it (for
today)! I had to put on some latex gloves after the first row of the first
shelf as my fingers were becoming caked with grime from the books themselves. I
knew that it would be easier and better for my hands if I finished the
collection scanning with gloves. Though there were students participating in
circulation, I was fortunate enough to just focus on inventory because Cindy
and Toni were present to run the standard library functions. I imagine that,
again, volunteers could be beneficial to this process or designated time would
need to be assigned to complete the inventory process most efficiently in my
own library.
While weeding, a few books immediately stood out to me as
potential weeding material: some old and yellowing texts and some outdated “pop
icons” (like Enrique Iglesias and N*sync). I went ahead and pulled those aside
as I will be working on weeding later this week. Otherwise, there were only a
few titles out of place (Es in the Bs) and a few missing over-barcode tape
strips. The real problem came when I had less than ten books left in the
section. Whoosh! The power dropped due to heavy rains and winds in the area. In
fact, the power is still out as I type into Word on a laptop—how ironic! The
power just resumed as I typed that sentence! Being the end of the day, though,
and with the network still down, I will start my inventory analysis tomorrow,
looking to weed and to fill any curriculum gaps in the biography section. We
did get to hunker down in the non-lit, no-windows closet for a while and
generally relax as all technology and power halted projects needing completion.
Thankfully, this laptop was available to continue working on my Practicum
Learning Outcomes and this reflection.
Overall, I’ve learned that flexibility is the key to success
in this environment: especially on crazy, unexpected days like today!
No comments:
Post a Comment