List poem

I had all of 15 minutes with a small group of y9 students to write a poem. Given that and that they were low ability I think we did quite well. First we brainstormed and then I gave them a sample of two lines of "I hear..." They chose dogs for their first line and then as a group made suggestions for the other lines. They all contributed and found it easy to come up with the rhymes. However they did not really like their finished product as they thought it was boring to keep repeating the I hear....
I could have done with editing and second draft but for 15 mins I was pleased that they all engaged and focused on the task

Hearing Homes

I hear dogs barking


I hear Jimbo larking

I hear cats scratching

I hear Mum snatching

(the dog)

I hear the TV blaring

I hear Mum caring

I hear my brother scaring

I hear blue snake hissing

I hear my sister kissing

I hear rulers bending

I hear my Dad mending

I hear my brother reading

I hear the scouts leading

I hear beds bouncing

I hear fish pouncing

White Crow Sedgwick

The minute I started reading this book I knew it was going to be great. It is a great gothic thriller, really scary with four main characters and two parallel stories, 200 years apart. What is heaven like? what is hell like? what happens when we die?

One line particularly struck me
"Does there have to be a victim to commit a crime?" or something like that.
Thought that would be good for a discussion.

I think it might be a good book to move students on who are stuck on vampires!

SLYA 2010 Ceremony

I had a wonderful day yesterday at the 6th SLA School Librarian of the Year Award ceremony. I was one of the judges but unfortunately I did not visit either of the winners schools, each judge bar Ginette only visited two schools. However I am sure all the libraries were great and I got loads of ideas from the two I visited!

I was fortunate to be on a table with MG Harris for the event. She gave a super talk and would recommend her for a school visit. I think this would work really well if you wanted to link it with her doing a workshop on codes and code breaking.

Anyway congratulations to Duncan and Kevin and I hope we see lots of them in the media in the coming months.

Below is a picture of myself (on left) with the winners and other past winners

National poetry day lesson plan

One teacher has said that she would like to do something in part of a lesson for NPD and so I thought I would prepare something for her and hopefully others to use. The theme for this year's event is Home and as I needed something that would be quick and easy but also give good results I decided to adapt some of the ideas from The List Poem. I hope the students respond, fingers crossed.
Using list poems


These are an easy way to get students to produce a poem quickly. They also begin to show students how to write poetic lines. Everyone knows about list so they are quick to introduce.

As the theme for poetry day is Home I thought you could start with a brainstorm list of things in the home

Mum, beds, doorbell, chairs, stairs, cups, books, lights etc

Then you could give the students a format to follow. They could present their poems in a shape relating to the house or just draw the outline of a house and write the poem inside the shape

1. I hear Mum singing
I hear Mum singing

I hear the doorbell ringing

I hear the clock ticking

I hear the dog licking

I hear the stairs creaking

I hear my sister peeking

2. Thankful

My Dad is thankful for his home

My Mum is thankful for her comb

My sister’s thankful for the colour pink

My Gran is thankful for the sink

My dog is thankful for his bone

Or


The kitchen’s thankful for the sink

The marshmallow is thankful for being pink

The pie is thankful for the custard

The sausage is thankful for the mustard

3. Colours

Brown is the dining table

Brown is my Dad’s shoe

Brown is the sugar just for coffee

Brown is the truly scrumptious toffee

Brown is my brother’s curly hair

Brown is my mood when nothing’s fair

Brown is the ginger cake

Brown is the muddy rake

4. When I am alone at home

When I am alone at home I get scared because I think the bogey man will come and take me

When I am alone at home I get happy because I can go anything I want

When I am alone at home I put music on and dance and pretend I’m a star

When I am alone at home I feel like going into my sister’s room and messing it up

When I am alone at home I play Scrabble with Teddy

When I am alone at home it’s a mission to survive

Till they all come home

Retro posters

RETRO POSTER - In the Library by Enokson. Used under a Creative Commons license.



Just come across these posters through Changing the Game blog
Just want to check out the CC license to see if I can use some of them in the library.
Cant remember seeing any in the 60s?

Things are getting better all the time

After our y10 induction lesson being praised, I have now been asked to do a brief intro to USIC to all the y12 tutor groups. I am pleased and will be able to use some of the things I did for y10, which makes planning easier.

Came across this website IPL2 for teens some of the info on projects is really useful and will definitely add it to our USIC homepage. I find that our students often are given or choose a topic that is just too big eg Victorian literature and they do not seem to know how to go about narrowing down the topic. IPL2 includes a link to a page on the University of Victoria's website which explains nice and clearly how to do just that

So busy term on the lesson front at the moment. 17 lessons this coming week (out of 21) but will share them with my assistant.

First Y10 induction lesson

Did the first of 12 Y10 induction lessons, 12 groups is one of the joys of a large school, at least I have 12 chances to get it right. This is my least favourite lesson. We feel that we have to do something to introduce the students to the upper school library but only have one lesson so there is not time to give them lots of activities to do.
Anyway the teacher who brought the group said that she thought it was the best lesson I have ever done with Y10 so was dead chuffed. But still felt it was too much of me talking and not enough of them doing stuff.
I asked the students if they could remember the author and title of the last fiction book they had read. In the first group only one student could but in the second about five could. I dont think they believed me when I told them that reading impacted on their test results.

So 2 down 8 to go.

Study habits

Forget the advice you normally give students as it appears that the tidy space and focus on one topic at a time is not effective!
Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits
Apparently  varying the topics and where you study helps. Also the article suggests that testing should be called something else because it "...cognitive scientists see testing itself — or practice tests and quizzes — as a powerful tool of learning, rather than merely assessment. The process of retrieving an idea is not like pulling a book from a shelf; it seems to fundamentally alter the way the information is subsequently stored, making it far more accessible in the future. "
“Maybe we need to call it something else, but this is one of the most powerful learning tools we have.”
Think I will have to share this with staff?

To every page, turn, turn, turn

This was the clever title for an article in THES which I was alerted to by the wonderful CILIP weekly news bulletin, which I find ever so useful
But back to the article, which is about the value of reading and his love for it
""Hold on to your books," I say. "They will help you through. Let them be your best friend, and they will remain a solace in your life as they continue to be in mine."

He has his 4am books which he turns to in times of stress!

How do we turn students to this from their worlds of online surfing and channel hopping?
We have a number of students who come into the library each lunchtime and sit in front of pcs and really do nothing but flit from screen to screen. Not quite sure how you would turn them on to reading.
Reading the article gives me a great feeling because I can relate to his passion for reading but not sure if the article would turn his or my students on to reading.

Publicity in Daily Mail

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1308885/School-libraries-fall-victim-cash-cuts.html
Why when so much is appearing in the press do the cuts continue.
Reading is what makes us uniquely human, without it would would not have the knowledge of our past.
Reading unlike film and TV gives us time to think and reflect

One of our targets for the year at our school library is to try to ingnite more of a passion for reading.
We are have lots of stuff planned and hope it will work
We seem to have a little window of opportunity at the moment with all this press coverage to show the world what we can do to change children's lives and to show everyone how shortsighted it would be to stop employing librarians

Nurturing good readers

I was asked my the SLA to write an article on what school librarians do and what we were looking for as judges of the school librarian of the year award. The article was published in Book Brunch today!
Ingrid Hopson, SLA School Librarian of the Year 2007 and a member of the judging panel for this year's award, explains why schools need librarians and what the judges were looking for when they selected this year’s Honour List (BookBrunch story)

You ask: what do school librarians do?

I answer: we help our pupils become better learners.

Libraries exist not as collections of resources but as places that foster creativity and independent thought. We cannot know what the world will be like for our pupils when they reach adulthood, but we can prepare them for their future.
Read more...
 I do not really like doing this sort of stuff as I am always worried what people will think of it!

Not sure if anyone I know will even see it as you have to register to read the articles

 

What issues should I focus on this coming year?

The great thing about schools is that you have the opportunity to start over. Not only do we get the chance to change and adapt what we do but we also get the chance to try it out on a whole new set of students who do not have any preconceived ideas about you or your library.

So what will I focus on this year?
My thoughts are beginning to crystallise as the summer holidays progress and lots of little things all start to pull together. Lots of the non fiction reading that I have been doing is helping this thought process.

I would definitely recommend these four books. Igniting a passion and Readers Advisory complement each other and this whole area of Readers' advisory services is going to be a focus for the year. This will mainly focus on fiction

The second focus I think will be all around the area of notetaking/referencing and citing. I am considering purchasing a subscription to Noodle Tools as I think this might be better than getting all the students to use Evernote and citation tools, not sure though.

And the third focus (everything has to be threes, or so they say)

Still not sure though, maybe as 1 is so big I ought to split it into two bits.

Fortunately there is still time to ponder.
Still need to decide that I am going to do in the Y10 into to USIC lesson and the English Y7 booked up lesson.

Libraries supporting literacy

Henning Mankell, plenary speaker, IFLA 2010, World Library and Information Congress, Gothenburg, Sweden.
I was alerted to this by the CILIP announcement of the untimely death of Bob McKee. What a shock as I had only been speaking to him on 20th July at the House of Commons launch of the school libraries survey. He had supported SLG so well in all our efforts and he seemed to be looking forward to his retirement.
So I then went to investigate the conference and listened to two presentations, this one and the Hans Rosling one (which was very annoying as you could not see the ppt he was pointing at, but much of the content seemed similar to other of his talks available on TED)
This Mankell talk was about literacy and the role of libraries. I would suggest you listen

Laugh at least once a day or life would be too miserable
To be able to read and write the question of being literate
What I want more than anything else in my life is an identity card, to get an identity card I need to be literate
Illiteracy is a plague that haunts the world.
The internet is the only thing we can thank the army for
People who read are armed forces words and pens are among the most dangerous things there are

His talk reminded me of a poem, in the past we did a lesson using this poem as a writing frame to discuss identity. Some of the poems the students produced were amazing and gave us such an insight into their lives, far more than if we had just asked them to write about what was  important to them. When I read the poem I realise what Mankell means about words being dangerous things but they are precious too and we need to take care how we use them.

Poem by Miroslav Holub A boy's head
(Image)


In it there is a space-ship

and a project

for doing away with piano lessons

And there is

Noah's ark,

which shall be first.

And there is

an entirely new bird

an entirely new hare

an entirely new [bumble-bee.

There is a river

that flows upwards

There is a multiplication table

There is anti-matter

And it just cannot be trimmed.

I believe

that only what cannot be trimmed

is a head

There is much promise

in the circumstance

that so many people have heads.

Miroslav Holub

Perfect Chemistry by Simone Elkeles

Perfect Chemistry by Simone Elkeles

The Perfect Book

I have been trying to read lots of teenage fiction ready for the new book club I want to start in September. Think I will call it First Choice Club, unless I think of anything better. Members will get the opportunity to read new books first (wont include the major new titles but the new ones that they might not otherwise notice) and hopefully the students might than do some sort of recommendation for the books to promote to others.
To remind me of each book I read I am making a brief record about it, again following ideas in Igniting a Passion for Reading. For each book I am trying to think of a hook, how I would sell the experience of reading the book to the students, not what it is about but how they will feel if they read it.

Then a few notes on plot to remind me and and idea of genre and target age. Just finish Simone Elkeles "Perfect Chemistry". At first I thought it was going to be very chick lit but infact it is more about loyalty and doing the right thing rather than what is expected of you. Even shed a few tears towards the end. Not sure about the epilogue though.

Readers' Advisory Work

At the moment I am planning a lesson for Year 7 about choicing fiction and was thinking of planning it on Steven Layne's shopping for fiction ideas. And now, as always, once something it going round in my head I spot other relating items. Checking emails this morning alerted me to SLJ's latest issue and I read this article
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/slj/home/885803-312/its_all_about_text_appeal.html.csp
Then thought it would great if I could read "Readers' advisory service in the public library" By Joyce G. Saricks and low and behold it is available online in google books. or at least up to page 41!
Skimming through spotted these sentences.
"most readers are not usually looking for a book on a certain subject. They want a book with a particular "feel""
We often ask students what they are interested in and then try to find a fiction book on that topic. But in reality this is probably all wrong and explains why the football fiction books are not popular. Perhaps if you like football you like playing it not reading about it. For reading you probably want something that makes you feel the same way you feel when you are playing football.
Now will have to buy or borrow thew book if I want to know more

Header

Thought it was about time to sort out a header for the blog.
This is part of a display that we have had in the school canteen. It is on a huge display board so it was quite a challenge to come up with something that filled the space.
You can see the full image on my flickr photostream http://www.flickr.com/photos/georgeabbot/sets/72157594419908410/

Next challenge will be to change it regularly!

A passion for reading

As well as reading lots of fiction I do like reading books about reading. By fire my imagination and inspire me to keep on trying new tacks at school to get kids reading for fun.
My latest find is Steven Layne's Igniting a passion for reading http://www.stenhouse.com/html/stevelayne.htm

Although really for teachers it has some great ideas for how to do just that.
I am now reading it for the second time so that I can pick out stuff that will work for me.
I am going to use his idea of teaching students about shopping for books with the booked up books this September. ( the book is available online at the moment, this section being on page 78)
He suggests that students do not know how to shop for books in the same way as they would know how to shop for clothers, phones etc. and that at school we do not really model the choosing process. He reminded me of Goggle Eyes (Anne Fine) when he jokes about kids going into a shop and asking for the yellow dot section. My daughter hated choosing books at school because the teacher told her that as she was a good reader she could only choose from the pink shelf, which was all the classics, when what she wanted to read was the Jean Ure's and Paul Danziger's (it was a while ago)
Anyway I digress. The shopping idea model's the whole choosing process and cant wait to try it out. At least I get 10 tries at getting it spot on!
I also like the way he emphasises that it does matter that students remember who wrote a book. (and who illustrated it) His analogy for this is that students would know who made their favourite clothes, which team their favourite footballer plays for and who sings the songs they like so they ought to remember who wrote the names of the people who write the books they like.

House of Commons

Time has flown as ever and the event now seems historic.
Got there early and it was great to catch up with people. I wonder if everyone's career world is so wonderfully networked as school librarian's, probably.
Cakes and tea were lovely, could have done with a goody bag as there was lots left over.
I was disappointed that Jim Knight was not there but Stephen Timms expounded the wonders of libraries.
Sue Shaper gave a great speech with key messages for different groups of people, will ask her if we can put her speech on CILIP SLG site.
As she said at that event we were preaching to the converted and in reality it is all the others that we need to reach.

SLG survey launch

I am so excited that I have been invited to the celebration at the House of Commons for the publication of the UK school survey. Stephen Timms is hosting the event and their should be around 50 plus people there.
Now what should I wear?.....