Busy Busy

8th hour was busy in the library today: had a journalism class and an 8th grade careers class...plus all the dinos, and the random kids coming in for new books. Whew!

Dinos!

The dinosaurs are here! Every year there is a local man who lends us the dinosaur collection that he handcrafted. Many of them go in the library, and the rest go in the 2nd grade rooms. Then the man comes and gives a presentation.

These are some of the little guys. There are about 30 total, most of them about 3 feet tall!

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The fourth graders seem to get more work done when listening to music, so I've got a Pandora channel set up just for that! KidzBops!

Ottumwa Robotics Qualifier

I will preface this post with three things:
1. I have never been more proud of a group of Central City students.
2. You can see photos/videos on our Facebook page.
3. This is going to be a long post. It's worth it. (look at bold sections for short/sweet version)


Wildcat robotics took two teams to the Ottumwa Qualifier: 4156 (our mostly senior team that competed last year) and 5097, freshman students from my robotics class. 

At a qualifying tournament, each team gets to play 6 "round robin" matches and then the top 4 teams in those matches (based on points and win percentage) get to advance to the finals.

In the first 6 matches for 4156, we did fairly well. During one match we fell over and didn't score any points, but our alliance helped win that match. Several times, we scored 80 points. At the end, we were in 4th place out of 16 teams, which was enough to go to the finals.

The first 6 matches for 5097 couldn't have gone any worse. The first 5 matches we had technical problems or programming problems and our robot didn't move at all. It was discouraging for the kids, but I told them to keep trying, and they did. Between each match the reprogrammed the entire robot & made some hardware changes as well. Finally, in the 6th match we went out and scored some points. We ended up in 8th or 9th place after the initial matches because of our alliances, but it wasn't enough to move on.

Then we came to the alliance selection, where the top 4 teams get to pick teams to move into the finals with them. Team 4156 was the 4th seed, but the 2nd seed picked the 3rd seed, so we got to move up into 3rd (which was a big advantage, because #1 plays #4 and #2 plays #3--meaning we didn't have to face #1 seed in the first finals round).  When it came our time to pick, Tyler chose a team who declined our offer (they wanted to be with the 4th ranked team). We were shocked at their declination, because the rules state that they couldn't go with the other team, which they of course didn't know. So, Tyler picked our 5097 team to be the alliance. I was thrilled with the choice, because 5097 worked hard all day and finally got things going in the 6th and final round.

Finals are best 2/3. We faced the #2 seed. We won the first match, but 5097 broke their tank treads and their arm. We had to call a time out, and they went to work, fixing the treads & completely removing the arm and changing strategies. We ended up winning round 2, despite being tipped over onto our backs.

We moved on to face the #1 seeds, which just so happened to be both Oskaloosa teams. We lost round 1 by quite a few, and then won round 2. Which meant it all came down to round 3. We ended up losing 127-102 as the team scored with only 2 seconds left in the match. 5097 played excellent defense, and 4156 got an 80 point stack, but it wasn't quite enough. Oskaloosa had two excellent robots that also had a good autonomous scoring method. 

So, despite awesome driving by Noah & Lucas, we finished 2nd. Not enough for a trip to state. However, the team who wins 1st & 2nd place in the overall achievement award, the Inspire Award, also gets to move on. Team 4156 was nominated for a couple of awards which we didn't win. We were surprised to win 1st place for the Inspire award, which I fully believe our team deserved. Which also means, we get to go to state! 

I was so proud of Tyler for picking our freshman team, who had had many failures that day. It truly could have cost them a trip to the state tournament. It was the ultimate display of gracious professionalism, and our kids had so much fun working together. They deserved the overall award because of the performance of their robot, their awesome interview with the judges, and mostly their dedication to getting more kids in our school interested in robotics--they can even get freshman basketball players to skip a basketball game to compete at robotics today, and made it worth it to them by allowing them to move on into the finals as an alliance team. In their interview, Tyler talked about leadership skills, and he showed some great leadership today. It was a great display of loyalty and school spirit, and it paid off!

There was much celebrating, but we were all exhausted after a long, emotional, tense, exciting day. Now, 4156 is ready to prepare for state competition on February 25! 

3 trophies, not too shabby!

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Today, the 1st graders got into partners and read/looked through a Caldecott book. Each book had two sticky notes: one with a star and one with a heart. They were supposed to mark the page they liked the most with a heart, and the page that they thought was the best with the star. They were also supposed to determine the medium used by the artist. Then, they took turns sharing their favorites. We talked about what made pictures "good" to us.

Bananas!

I wish there was audio for this picture. The 1st graders were reading the book Banana. It's a wordless book other than the words banana and please. They were, of course, shouting instead of reading--but oh well. My library isn't quiet very often--and that's how I like it!

January 24

Showing our support at the breast cancer awareness basketball game.

The Kids Are Gonna Love Me (more!)!

Here are the books that I bought at Barnes & Noble last night. Organized into stacks, of course.

Stack #1, which I'm most excited about: a stack of books for boys. It's so hard to find good books for boys, and I have some really good readers that are always running out of things to read! The top book, The Dead I'm super excited about--but I've gotta go back to get book 1, The Enemy. I had some very specific kids in mind when picking these out. 

Stack #2, kind of the lamest stack--basically the ones that didn't fit into another stack. The book on top reminded me of our ag teacher who is always talking about Borlaug, so I couldn't resist. I also didn't know that Jan Brett had a version of Beauty & the Beast! Third graders are reading fairy tales right now, so I'm excited about that one. (Plus, I just saw Beauty & the Beast in 3D today!) The bottom two have covers that will attract every 13 year old girl I know.

A stack of classics that are written at a 3rd-4th grade level. Huck Finn & Tom Sawyer are two of my favorite books, and I think the kids will be excited to see Peter Pan & Pinocchio.

And this is a stack of requests. Tonight on the Titanic I am so excited about, because in April we're doing a Titanic themed unit (on account of the 100th anniversary and because I love, love Titanic). Girls are always begging me for Pretty Little Liars, and I think this is the only one that we didn't have. A 6th grader asked me the other day if we had the next School of Fear books, which we didn't. But now we do! And at the bottom is the 5th Charlie Bone book, which somehow went missing from our collection. Several students have started the series and gotten stuck at book 5--but no longer! 

Plus I saved $83, which is essentially 5 books.

Have I ever told anyone I have the best job ever?!

January 22

I went to Barnes & Noble tonight--it was the last day of their teacher appreciation sales. Let me just say, the kids are totally going to appreciate this teacher when they see the goodies in these 2 bags!

January 21

Today, I downloaded iBooks Author on to my computer and made the first two sections of a book about our OPAC, Follett Destiny. It was super easy to import graphics & movies and add text. I also created glossary terms and a quiz. I imported a screencast of me showing how to do a keyword search (I used screencast-o-matic). Now, if only we had a bunch of iPads sitting around...

January 20

Today was our first full snow day of the school year. I had quite a productive day--first thing on my list was updating my computer to OS X Lion & installing iBooks Author. Hopefully tomorrow I'll have time to start creating a book!

January 19

Got some new great African animals books with 1st grade AR levels! I love finding books that the first graders can read by themselves--they can be hard to come by!

January 18

Got in the final shipment of my winter book order.

Jan. 17

Check out the Pinterest boards I made of our new books!

http://pinterest.com/acalhoun40/new-books-january-4-8/  --Middle School Books

http://pinterest.com/acalhoun40/new-elem-fiction-1-12/   --Elementary Chapter Books

http://pinterest.com/acalhoun40/new-picture-books-1-12/ --Picture Books & Graphic Novels

http://pinterest.com/acalhoun40/new-hs-books-january/   --High School Books

January 16: MLK Day

We are one of the lucky schools who gets to actually be in school today, but we have an early out for PD which lands me having library with the entire 2nd grade; all 36 of them. Since it's MLK day, we watched an MLK book on BookFlix. We also had a very good discussion about segregation and civil rights. None of them had ever heard of Rosa Parks either, so we talked about that. They were kind of appalled, and rightly so. They pointed out, "It's all very unfair," and "Things could never be like that now."

January 15

I usually use Sunday nights to get a lot of work done, but tonight, I went sledding instead. And it was totally the right decision! Librarians have real lives, too!

January 14

Did some work today while cheering on the 7th grade girls basketball team. Had out my computer during other teams' games, and cheered during ours! Was funny looking around at how many Kindles/tablets/iPods there were in the hands of kids and adults. Saw a few people with books, too!

Librarian/Fan

Wildcat librarian by day, Wildcat basketball fan by night.

January 12

This is a screen shot from my LanSchool during 3rd grade. I rarely use it with those kids, but they actually love it when I do. They think its so cool I can be watching all of their screens, and usually I project this up on to the screen and then I walk around helping people. Plus, these 3rd graders are all always on task!

January 11

A few of the new books...they fly off the shelves before I can photograph them!

January 10: This is a nerd test.

Libraries are generally (supposed to be) organized, but sometimes things just end up in the wrong spot--even if they look okay there! Who can spot the out-of-place book? (Hint: This is our graphic novel section.)

January 9

Some days things go like this:

January 8

I started the next painting for the library today. Just a rough sketch so far--was definitely harder than anticipated, and I haven't drawn forever!

January 7

Did you know you can access the library catalog from home? I have a handy button on my Chrome toolbar to get me there.

January 6

A fun morning in the library:

Third graders are doing a fairy tale unit. Today we started reading Mike Artell's cajun versions of 3 different fairy tales. The kids listened to him reading them on YouTube while they followed along in the book. Next week we'll compare/contrast them with the originals.

And first graders earned a popcorn party for being so kind! We watched the Toy Story book app on my iPad, then Knuffle Bunny on BookFlix. 

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This is the new spot for new high school books. We moved them so they'd be a little closer to the other high school books and so that we could have a separate spot for new elementary fiction.

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The 3rd & 4th graders were so excited about new books that we wrote "hold lists" on notecards because the books haven't even been processed yet! I couldn't resist--they were so excited! I would say we have at least 20 new books with hold lists of 5 or more people. I love when kids are pumped up to read!

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We had a few books returned today! The  days right before and after breaks are always busy. Also, we were trying to straighten up from having everything moved out of the room because of carpet, and did some extra cleaning because the Iowa caucus was hosted in the library tonight!

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Day two and I'm still blogging; whew.
Here's the new library carpet! I love it and the room looks much bigger now.

2nd Grade Haiku

After reading Dogku by Andrew Clements, the 2nd graders wrote and illustrated haiku poems about winter. Check them out in the Flipsnack book I made.

The embed code isn't working but the URL is here: http://snack.to/5vgRs14

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Since it is the start of a new year, I thought I'd start the challenge that my friend Kathy (@scsdmedia) did last year--post a photo a day, every day. We'll see how long I last!

Today's photo is the stack of books that I read over break- nine total, which is one short of my goal. I guess there's still tomorrow, right!?