Thursday, July 31, 2014

It's Coming Whether I Am Ready or Not!

Yep, that's right.  The school year is almost here - August 13!  Yikes!

I thought I'd share what I've been busy with these past few weeks that I've neglected my blog, new Facebook page, new Twitter account, etc.  (and here I always thought summer was the time to start these things!!!).

I've been working on displays in the library and am anxiously awaiting some acrylic sign holders for the signs I've made (which I promise to take pics of later -with the "complete" design).

Excuse the tables on top of the shelves - carpet cleaning.  Our fiction shelves were crammed tight!  Books were floating on top and yes, I know that things would loosen up once checkout starts, but still.....
Since we are a relatively new school (opened in 2010) we still had some empty shelves, so to lighten the fiction section's load, I took out numbered series and it really cleared up space!  I didn't know what a difference it made visually until a teacher came by and she noticed we had the Redwall series (which I guess when shelves are crammed, it's hard to see).


Here is where I put the series books....I tried to do higher series on one side and lower reader/interest series on the other side.  There's still some room to grow as we add to certain series (and maybe pick up some new ones!).  I'm going to use the rounded shelf markers from Demco to highlight the series and put the picture on each one so students can find them easily.  Again, I realized the difference it made when my 7 year old realized we actually had a full Disney fairy series (but since they were by different authors, they were spread different places!).



Okay, moving on to actual displays.  The pyramid is Playmobil.  I earned a grant from them several years ago for the Egyptian set and even though I'm not second grade anymore, found it still comes in handy!


Found a use for some of the posters I saved!  I've always loved my space one :)


I have to admit, it took over 5 hours to straighten up the nonfiction area!  Last year, our elementary librarians lost their assistant, so we had parent volunteers in helping shelve books, help check out books, etc.  That, or the transportation and animal books, in particular, had an epic battle!




My mystery spotlight. :)  I don't have a separate mystery section because other than series, I'm not sure if it needs one (or I have room!).  Plus, it's elementary, so I don't see a huge need.  However, I had these cute bulletin board characters that in the past have been "Grammar Detectives" so now they're living a new life by focusing on some of our mystery stories!  I used to have cute little footprints that went along with it, but will need to replace them with something else...again, it's also waiting for a sign!



I'm a sucker for teaching math with literature, and I was so excited to find so many cute math books that I am more or less highlighting these to share with the teachers as we hold our back to school meetings in the library.  (There's a method to my madness!).


So, I've also been working on different signs for the library, as well as Dewey signs.  I want to get them up and in place before I'm offering them publicly (just to check myself that I like what I did without changes!).  However, here's a sneak peek!









0 comments:

Post a Comment