Day 2

It was an action packed day at Rawson Elementary School in South Milwaukee. I started out checking in and out some books from students and then re-shelved a bunch more but I didn't have a lot of time. 4th graders were coming in first thing in the morning for their library instruction. I assisted with the instruction for two fourth grade classes. They were working on haiku's.

After that I got to go with Deb over to the South Milwaukee Public Library and sit in on a meeting with Deb and the two heads of the SMPL to start planning events for the upcoming Children's Book Week, which is the second week of May. We discussed themes, promotion, and their big evening which is on Tuesday, May 11th. They bring in children's authors and illustrators to talk to children and their parents. I forget what the official name of the event is but they were hoping to get the author Janet Halfmann who lives in South Milwaukee, researches at the SMPL, and donates a lot of her books to the library, to come in again this year. They also were hoping to get the illustrator Jeff Miracola to come back. I guess both of them were there last year and did great jobs presenting. I think Jeff lives in Greenfield too. It sounds like a great experience and I'm glad I could be a part of the planning process. I think we're going to have one more meeting before the event takes place.

After the meeting at the public library I headed back to Rawson. I then started teaching the first of six consecutive classes that come in the afternoon. I had a kindergarten class, two 3rd grades, and three second grades. There was no break whatsoever between them. By the time one class finishes, the next is waiting in line at the door. Classes come into the library twice a week at Rawson for two 30 minute lessons. The first meeting is designed for a lesson and the second is intended for checking out and reading books. The two third grade classes were only checking out books today, but I learned it's hard to keep an eye on the whole class when you're sitting at the computer checking out books to a long line of students for a majority of the meeting. I spotted a few students doing things they weren't supposed to be doing and corrected the matter. For the kindergarten and three second grade classes, my lesson focused on bears and music because March is "Music in the schools" month. I asked what they already knew about bears and then we looked at non-fiction books about bears. I finished the lesson by reading them the story about the bear and his orchestra who's wagon gets stuck in a pot hole on the way to a concert. I can't remember the title of the book, but the main character has a bee stuck in his bass and it eventually flies out and stings the mule pulling their wagon, which leads to the mule pulling the wagon out of the hole and getting the orchestra to the concert in time. Some of the students had some questionable behavior during the lesson but overall it was a great experience. I learned a lot today and I think I got a good taste of what it's like to be a elementary school Library Media Specialist.

Elementary hours today: 7
Elementary hours total: 14

Day 1

Today was my first day in an elementary school library. I was at Rawson Elementary School in South Milwaukee. I started my day with a tour of the school and the library and then started to re-shelve books because there were two full carts of books. I only made a small dent in the load because I quickly moved on to other tasks. Deb showed me how to import new records into Alexandria. She had an order of about 13 new books that just came in. The MARC records were included electronically with the order so it was fairly easy to do. I just needed to change what the spine label would say to make it universal with the rest of the books and then import the MARC records into the system. She also showed me how to print the barcodes and spine labels and also the color dot process to help students pick books based on reading ability levels. Accelerated Reader is also very popular at the school, however I have not really worked with that yet. I also imported some new books that were recently donated to the library so they did not have any MARC records. I had to input information such as title, author, call number, subject(s), publishing location, publisher, and if it is part of a series. I then updated lexile numbers for the books in the collection by importing the data.

Next I started to prepare information for the lesson I was going to teach to two of the classes. With tomorrow being Dr. Seuss's birthday, I focused the lesson on him and his books. I taught two third grade classes and I thought it went pretty well, especially since I really wasn't expecting to get thrown right into the mix by teaching classes today. I'm glad I did though. It was pretty fun. I gave the students some background information on Dr. Seuss and asked them to name how many of his books they could think of. Then I focused the discussion on "Green Eggs and Ham." There are only 50 different words in the book, which was a dare from Suess's editor, (he bet him $50 he couldn't write a book using only 50 words). In small groups, I had the students create a list of words they thought were in the book. Then I read off the 50 words and had them see how many they got right. The winning groups got some small prizes. Then with the time I had left, I read "Green Eggs and Ham" to them. Once the classes were done I continued to re-shelve books until it was time for me to go.

I had a very enjoyable day today. I learned how to import new books into the system and got to work with elementary students again. I also got to re-shelve books!! Nothing like crawling around on the floor trying to find where each books goes. I think I'm going to be spending all my elementary hours in Rawson School which I'm happy about because it's a pretty modern school and it has a great library.

Elementary Practicum hours today: 7
Elementary Practicum hours total: 7