I eat, breathe, sleep middle-grade and YA lit. I just do. I don't read adult books, simply because I'm in love with lit for students. I inhale books, and thank goodness for Goodreads because it's such an easy way to keep track of everything I read - both online and on the app (add me …
Continue reading Where I’ve Been & Where I’m Going: My 1st Post about Books
When I was younger, I think around elementary school, my friends and I would make these origami things for our fingers - we called them fortune tellers. The outsides usually had colors, like red, and you would open and close your fingers based on the number of letters there were in the word your partner …
Continue reading Makerspace on the Road: Beginning English and Origami
I want to share an experience I had recently with one of my students, because it personifies our purpose as librarians (and it's also a really good story). He came into the library a few months ago with his English class, with the task of finding a book for a free-choice independent reading project. Aside …
I absolutely love that my library's makerspace has been able to serve our Beginning English class this year. See this post from October about our first lessons! For a variety of reasons, we haven't been as consistent about having monthly lessons in the makerspace as we first intended. This month, we were determined (that, and …
If you're like me, this past week has been...rough. Aspects of our country have been changed so much, often at a flick of a pen, much to the horror and shock of many people in America - and across the globe. It hasn't been easy on my students, either. The middle school where I work is …
Continue reading Providing Safety When Students’ Lives Get Complicated.
Last year I thought and thought about what my one word to guide my year would be. I narrowed to two, Create & Share, and decided to go with both since they went so well together. It was great to have both words and focus my first year of blog posts around these really inspiring …
So even though I'm down to the wire with this post (4 hours and 32 minutes of 2016 left!) I wanted to do some brief reflecting on my first year blogging, my words for 2016, and what 2017 holds. Hoping this post will be quick and to the point; we'll see if it actually happens! …
I've been debating for a few days whether or not this post was actually going to come to fruition. I went back and forth, wondering if this was even a topic posting about and if it would mean anything to anyone. The conclusion I came to was that it means everything to me, so I'm …
When I first was planning my makerspace, I set a goal for myself to find at least 3 ways for each subject to use the makerspace in the standards/lessons they already teach. Well, while I was far from reaching my goal, some really great ideas came out of that brainstorming. One of them was working …
Today I have a grand total of 8 students in our makerspace after school. With the exception of two students working together on stamping and crafts, everyone is working on their own project. A smattering of projects: One student is making a helmet from parts of a paper box and aluminum foil, another is creating …
