We took the week of 8 – 12 February to celebrate our reading. This is the sixth time we have had our annual Love Reading week and every year it gets better. This year the activities included:
Blind date with a book for grades 5 and over. Tempting the risk takers in our community we wrapped books and left clues on them. Students who chose the books made a commitment to read the entire book
Paper crafts in the library at lunchtime. We repurposed old books and made bookmarks, poems, boxes and flowers. This was so popular at Marmara we will hold a craft lunchtimes every Friday for the rest of the year.
Bookmark competition. Our students created bookmarks and the winning ones will be copied and given out from the library. One student entered 17 bookmarks.
PTA book swap. An annual treat – students love to swap out old books for new to them books. a great way to recycle.
Dress as your favourite book character. Asking librarians to choose a favourite book character is a little hard so here at Marmara we came as library angels.
The primary teachers on both campuses did Readers’ Theatre style book reviews for their students during assemblies. The books reviewed were “The Dot” and “The Witches”.
We launched the second annual Battle of the Books for grade 5 and 6 students.
Last year we had our first skirmish in Battle of the Books. Grade 5 and 6 made teams and together they had to answer quiz questions about the 5 titles we had chosen for the Battle. It was so successful that we are having another Battle but with seven titles this time. Students are encouraged to read as many titles as they can. It is vital that each team has all the books read so they can answer the questions.
Celebrate our reading week starts next week – 8 – 12 February and every day everyone in our school will Drop Everything and Read (DEAR)
Next week all students and staff will stop everything else and read from 8.40 – 9 every morning. We will have guest readers coming to read to our Early Years classes during the week too.
There will be communal areas available for people to read together – these areas are: the library, the main foyer (we will try to provide mats to sit on), the grade 5 and 6 commons area, the reception area, the end of the lower primary corridor.
WHY are we doing this? The PLC group Culture of Independent Reading is exploring how we can build a school wide culture of independent reading. There are many articles and books we have been reading that show the benefits of allowing students to choose what they read and give them some time in the school day to read. “Regular reading not only boosts the likelihood of an individual’s academic and economic success — facts that are not especially surprising — but it also seems to awaken a person’s social and civic sense.” National Educators Association.
So next week we will be making time in our day to DEAR
“We make time for what we value, and if we value reading we must make time for it. ” Donalyn Miller, The Book Whisperer
Watch out for our twitter hashtag #iicsreads and instagram tag iicsfamily for photos and news throughout celebrate our reading week.
Today the grade 2 students at Hisar discovered how to use Destiny to find age appropriate websites. They need to login to Destiny with their username and password and then put a search term in the find box. Destiny will search for library resources first but then the student can select the Web Sites tab and it will run the same search. Then the students can select which grade level they are and Destiny will search for websites appropriate for that grade level. Teachers find the websites for Destiny and allocate which grade level they are appropriate for. If students need help remembering their passwords they can ask one of the librarians. Students should try to login to Destiny from home and bookmark the url for the website so they can easily find it again. There is a screencast explaining all of this below the photos.
Book bags are not a compulsory part of the school stationery requirements – but many of the students in grade 1 Marmara have them. We are so grateful to the students, their parents and teachers for helping us to take care of our library books so well. At Hisar Campus Mrs Paze was able to give the students some left over bags. Book bags help our students look after their library books so that many students can read and enjoy them.
Author visit Matt DickinsonOctober saw the return of Matt Dickinson to our school. Matt has written the Mortal Chaos series and is currently finishing the final book in his series the Everest Files. Matt spoke with grades 5 – 10 in a gruelling schedule in the morning of the first IICS write-in. In the afternoon, after catching his breath, he worked with some of the writers. Matt is also a documentary maker and he showed some of his documentary about an exhibition to Antarctica on the yacht the Pelagic.
Author visit Roxie Munro Roxie was a keynote speaker at the Children’s Media Conference held in Istanbul. She is an author and illustrator who not only publishes books but also helps to create apps based on her books. We have two of her books, Circus and Busy Builders. The teachers at Hisar have also been using her book Doors which is available in Tumblebooks. The students have been making flags for their own castles during play based learning time. Roxie also gave a talk to teachers during their lunch break. I have video tape of her sessions and she has given permission for me to create some short films about her work and the ideas she presented about play based reading. It occurred to me as I was listening to her that reading with our students can almost always be play based depending on our approach.
Buy this book pleaseIn an effort to involve our students in book purchasing decisions this Google form has been embedded in the library website I have put in purchase requests and hope to order the titles through Amazon. I am finding that with our Turkish address the postage, tax and import duties allowances are coming to the about the same as the cost of the books themselves. Last year I was using Book Depository which has no shipping fees and the tax is paid as part of the book purchase price. The drawback with using this company is that they do not issue invoices. I will chat with Icten to see how much of a problem that is them when they are audited.
Digital Citizenship week presented a great opportunity to offer lessons and raise awareness of citations and academic integrity. I spoke with grade 4M about some specific questions they had and that week while working with grade 6 on nonfiction reading skills we discussed academic integrity. The survey results offer some insights into the need to work more closely with grade 7 – 10.
Feedback to Grade 7 Historical Narrative unit Both Tina and Jacob invited me to work with their students on interview skills and research using Destiny, EBSCO and Encyclopedia Britannica. Tina shared the end results of her unit and I was able to analyse the bibliographies. This analysis shows that the students are using Easybib as a citation tools but not understanding how to use it well. Tina and I will work together on this during their next research assignment
ATL’s and reading history through Destiny With the questionnaire and goal setting being done on Approaches to Learning in grades 7 – 10 I realised students may not know how to access their own borrowing history in Destiny. I made a screencast showing students how to do this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNgcz6EO0qE
Opportunities and Challenges
RED book awards We were sent multiple copies of four finalists for these awards which are run by the Falkirk Community Trust in Scotland. Some students in grade 7 have committed to reading all four books in order to vote on which one they think should be the winner. The winning book is selected by teenagers through a voting process. This has been quite a challenge as the students commit to read the books whether or not they are the kind of book they would normally read. I have created a Google community for them to comment on the books https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/102742714917994667707 I hope we can be invloved with this again next year, all four books are worthy nominations
Wendy Gutenkauf from Follett visiting our school 9th December we are hosting Wendy. She will meet with our New Literacies team for 30 minutes to discuss how we can possibly buy digital video and have it available through Destiny. I will be talking with her about streamlining our federated search facility through Destiny. Lindsey, Ozlem and Dina are collected specific Destiny questions as well. A few years ago Wendy provided a quote for IICS to buy Textbook Manager in order to keep track of readers, equipment and so on. The good news is that Follett Corporation has combined Textbook Manager and Asset Manage into one Asset manager system. This may be a useful product for us when managing things like musical instruments, textbooks, electronic equipment and so on.
CEESA job-a-like for librarians I have been helping to organise this for the day before the CEESA conference. The theme is “The first place of personalisation – the library”. Our venue will be SALT Galata and the programme includes a Skype session with Katie Day from Singapore and discussions on Library space and the librarian’s role in personalised learning.
Quote of the month in honour of the RED book awards books: A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading. William Styron
