Lit Club

MrsPotts reads a lot and lately has knocked off a few goodies. Apart from the fact that there’s nothing better than getting engrossed in a great story, as a Teacher Librarian it sure helps to know what you’re talking about when it comes to recommendations for kids and teachers. As always there have been stand-outs and I just loved ‘The One and Only  Ivan’ by Katherine Applegate. I’ve infected a few other people with my enthusiasm for this story – a couple of my teachers are reading it to their class, Sandra couldn’t put it down and my sister has shared it with her colleagues as well.
We have a Lit Club running from the library here... the idea was to provide examples of really good literature for teachers and students to read. I’d realised that lots of teachers aren’t readers and this was one way to get a bit of momentum going in that area. It’s great to be able to go to the LC shelf and point kids and teachers towards a great read. There’s a real buzz at the moment  as something has recently clicked with a group of senior girls who want to read “really good books to help with our reading”.  They take book-choosing very seriously with lots of talk & discussion as they read the blurbs, sifting and sorting and trying to get the same book as their friends!
Our Lit Club began after MrsPotts and TheDP did Wayne Mills’ Children’s Literature post-grad paper at Auckland Uni. My mind was opened! I learnt how to look at books differently - in a deeper way that’s for sure. We learned about embedded ideologies, post-modern picture books and inter textuality.Who knew?!
I wrote a few thousand words about the wonderful, amazing and different ‘Skellig’ by David Almond - the type of book I didn’t really read before. I wrote another few thousand about ‘Fox’ by Margaret Wild and Ron Brooks. This book is now used constantly for Inquiry.  ‘Al Capone does My Shirts’… another few thou about my ‘efferent and aesthetic response’ to this novel. whew! MrsPotts had to re-read the essay to find out what that meant! but I do remember loving this story with it’s themes of family, friendships and relationships.
Meanwhile TheDP was writing about the meanings,implications and ideologies of one of Gavin Bishop’s stories. Having met Gavin a couple of times, she emailed him to make sure that she was on the right track with her ideas. No, said Gavin, it’s much simpler than that – it’s just a story! Not that it mattered really as we had lots of fun debating who was right.
 It is easy now to interact with authors and tell them how much you liked their story. How cool to follow @peterhreynolds on twitter and tell him ‘The Dot’ is one of our most popular books…and to tell Patrick Ness that ‘The Crane Wife’ was a fab read. Alex from ‘The Universe vs Alex Woods’ has his own @ThingsAlexKnows on twitter & there was a competition running to find out where Alex is which links to the story really well.
 The potential to get our kids interacting with the authors is untapped at present but MrsPotts has a goal to work on here - enriching the reading of our kids by interacting with the authors who have put themselves out there sharing the hidden and not-so hidden messages in their stories.

I'm back...

Well hello there, and you could say it's been a while - August 2012 to be exact!  and whilst there's been a lot of water under the bridge since then, MrsPotts is back in business. So it's 'on with the show' as Miranda would say.
Term two is already two weeks down and in the library it's been business as usual with lots of issues, Duffy book selections, Info Lit lessons, showing kids EPIC, Te Ara, AnyQuestions etc, using You Tube, The Literacy Shed to watch v cute animated stories (http://www.literacyshed.com/) and trying to manage computer-game-crazy boys to name a few. Then there are the new initiatives. MrsPotts has a very short attention span and has been known  to rearrange the furniture quite a lot :-) so these new initiatives are code for 'let's do something interesting and exciting to get me on my bike and racing to school every day'! 
We've been talking for a while about giving kids the opportunity to be creative and be given the opportunity to explore making 'stuff'. Lots has been written about creativity and I'm a believer in giving kids heaps of opportunities to explore and create and play and make. To be frank there haven't been many opportunities with our very- timetabled-overcrowded-timetable and as we all know some teachers are better at getting the creative out of kids than others. (Our Art specialist being the major exception and that is another story).
 The idea which had been bubbling along was for a Mad Inventor's-type club of some sort and I volunteered a space in the library for this and call it our makerspace (of which there's also quite a lot  written about). As with all these things my friends, it depends on the people, the people, the people... so imagine my delight when the opportunity arose to employ the ultimate Mr-Maker-Space-Cadet himself. We've known Calvin for a while and he is the perfect man for the job. He's set himself up in a sunny corner of the library with bits and bobs and wire and batteries and things that go whirr! right next to the boxes of lego and the train set. Already I can see and feel a change. There are more children coming in the door each day... new faces too.They meet me at my car in the morning, grab my keys and open the door. Lights, Action, Music as they say in the movies! (Yes, there's going to be a movie too but more on that another time).
Kids are sharing and talking about their creations, they are staying after school to explore and play in the makerspace. This week I've issued books on electricity and inventions and how to make models.
Fantastic stuff.