Before I morphed into being a librarian, I was a 5th grade home room teacher for 7 years. Prior to that I was a High School Drama and English teacher for 12 years.

Deciding to get my Masters as a Library Media Specialist was one of the best professional decisions I’ve made. Every week I get to combine my love for Drama, Reading and Children as I enjoy 22 classes for 30-40 minute check out sessions where we start with a mini-lesson then move on to browse and borrow.

The mini-lesson is generally a read aloud, book talk or database tutorial. We might go over how to use our library catalog ‘destiny’, how to find our favourite books via Sora (Overdrive), how to work our old school ipads and ipod nano’s which are loaded with digital books and audiobooks, or how to navigate a NON touch-screen kindle “it’s not working, it’s not working.”

Sometimes at the start of a class I might model pulling up a chair in front of a non-fiction shelf and browsing; kids need help knowing how to do this well; shelf markers and clear guidelines help a lot. It drives me CRAZY when they hold their books, or worse, drink bottles, in their hands while they’re browsing shelves. I’m like “put everything down, roll up those sleeves, take a deep breath, we are here to find a great book, now let’s go shopping!”

For my interview to attain the ES Librarian position, I wrote a poem, I Love a Buzzing Library. This week, as the library buzzes larger than life, I am reminded that this is exactly what I wanted.

From November to February, we kept data on how many books were checked in each morning, and sorted them into categories based on their area in the library such as picture books, non fiction and graphic novels etc. After displaying the data daily for months, we thought we’d see how good the students were at estimating how many books would be returned each day, with the cut off being 9 am.

It’s been fun seeing their guesses, ranging from 0 (never going to happen) to 1,000 (it’s possible, our biggest check in so far was 807 books on one day). On some mornings we’ve had almost 1/3 of the students make a guess, that certainly creates some library buzz. Congratulations to the students who guessed the closest numbers without going over the total, David 2SE, Bryan and Roy 3NM, Chloe 3ED, Sophia X 4BW, Jion, Olivia, Titian, Monique 4BW, Sophie 5DN, Ellie and Alex 5MR and Michelle from 5SJ. Each child will receive a brand new book, often signed by the author.

Take a look at some of our activities in the library this week.

We are getting ready to celebrate International Women’s Day and have put a LOT of purple books out on display. Every day we hear “why are there so many purple books?” Hey, who knew? Turns out we DO have a lot of purple books!