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