Close your mouth, you're drooling all over the . . .

[velvetpage]

Books!!!!!

The teacher-libarian and the LRT (who was the TL last year) went shopping. They spent three thousand dollars in three hours at the National Book Service in Toronto. They had two NBS employees following them around with scanners, scanning books in as they went, and they were constantly handing things over and having the clerk say, "You already ordered that one."

(Our school is rolling in cash for books this year - book room funding, independent reading program funding, home reading program funding, and library funding, for a combined total of more than twenty thousand dollars. We have to spend it all this year, though, so we're all shopping until we drop.)

Well, the books arrived yesterday.

There are nearly forty books for grade 5 social studies, most of which are for Ancient Civilizations. (I have yet to see an author who can make the Canadian Government unit look fun to a ten-year-old. If anyone knows of any, please let me know. There's another three grand to spend in the library.) There are series of books called, "Ancient Greek _______" - six books, including children, homes, religion, food, clothing, etc. There's an equivalent set for Ancient Rome and Ancient Egypt. There's the month of April, right there - I'll pair them up, have them do a short research project on one book, then the pairs will split up and join people doing the same topic in a different civilization. Those three will do a compare-and-contrast presentation for the class.

I'm going to grab one of the books already on the shelf (there are exactly ten ancient civ books already on library shelves. Ever tried doing a research project with ten books between thirty-three kids?)and do a model project for them - how to write the facts, what constitutes a fact, how to reorganize the facts into categories that work for them, and how to take those facts and write paragraphs with them - topic sentence, body sentences with examples, concluding sentence, they're getting the whole thing. Forget two-day research projects. I WANT this to take at least three weeks, preferably four. And there's another project to follow right after it, using the rest of the new library books.

This is going to be fun. I almost don't want to give up Social Studies for French next year. Almost.

Then again, we're starting "Le Prince Grenouille" right after Easter. That should be loads of fun. I'm limiting it to days we can get into the gym for practice, though. If I can get the gym teacher to agree to take his class for that period outside on a Wednesday, I can get Mondays and WEdnesdays both in the gym doing plays. I'll find filler stuff for the other days - whole-class practice and pronunciation review, probably. No kid in my class will ever get away with pronouncing "grenouille" as "greenoull."

It's the Friday before March Break! Everyone do a dance!!

Comments

[anidada.livejournal.com]

Wow. I'm drooling all the way over here, and I haven't even seen the books! $20k? *GLEEEEEE!* Though, granted, I'm betting it's long overdue...

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

In October, we went through the library and threw out any book that was a) in poor repair, b) irrelevant or too high a reading level, or c) older than the youngest teacher (me - if it predated 1975, we figured it should go.) We got rid of literally two-thirds of the non-fiction books. The fiction stuff gets weeded naturally when the books fall apart, but there wasn't a lot there that was newer than ten years old - a few hundred dollars worth of paperbacks, maybe.

Now, we've got seven big boxes of new non-fiction books, bought to support specific areas of the curriculum that we told them were lacking. I threw out three shelves out of four of 900's books; we just replaced more than half of them, and they're books our kids will read and use.

We've also been updating our book room. The goal of a book room is sets for guided and shared reading. We have big books for shared reading and sets of six, short books, leveled, for guided reading. (When I say leveled, I don't just mean by grade - there are four or more divisions per grade, as well.) We now have all our six-packs in ziploc baggies, labelled and sorted in bins in numerical order by level and book type. I just finished a unit on biographies, using those books. It was great, and the kids were interested (until I told them their homework over March Break was to turn their facts into paragraphs. They weren't too pleased then.)

The single most important factor in literacy improvement at a school is the state of the library or other book collections available to the kids. Nothing else comes close to that in importance. It's no accident that homes with many books produce kids who read. Schools with many books do, too.

[anidada.livejournal.com]

You know, the article I linked to below shows kids reading two books that are old, but which I would gladly take off their hands if they were going to throw them out... It's true that a lot of books of that vintage are suspect (and probably in bad condition), but then again, most of the Dr. Seuss books are older than us. :) That's fiction, mind you. A lot of that can be repurchased. Non-fiction gets stale really fast (overnight, sometimes, in the case of history and social studies).

It's good that you're able to make a fresh start with the guided reading stuff -- I wouldn't be surprised if they were still using the same reading comprehension sets I used at my junior high!

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

We threw out an entire series of books that had titles like, "We Live in the U.S.S.R." They were published in 1988. Talk about bad timing, eh?

As for the fiction - the kids take one look at the dusty, colourless dust cover and don't touch it. A lot of these books are being republished in new editions, which we buy, push, and then point out the old editions when six kids want the new one at the same time. Every copy of Mrs. Frisby is currently out, because I'm reading it to my lit group. :)

I have a beef about the way our reading was assessed. I was told in grade 4 that I had a grade 12 reading level, because I had a huge vocabulary and liked to make use of it. I also had very good context-clues skills, so I could often make a good guess at unknown words. But the idea that I could have read a twelfth-grade text with any level of comprehension is absurd. I was probably reading at what we would consider a grade 8 level at that time, based on which novels I was reading and understanding. The thing is, parents remember being told what grade level they were reading at, and when their child doesn't meet the same numbers, they think their kid doesn't read as well as they did at that age. There are times when it's true, but it's a lot less frequent than parents or the general public believes.

[anidada.livejournal.com]

I just stumbled on this article (http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1110495015509&call_pageid=968332188492) about the dismal state of school book collections -- timely or what? :D (Go to bugmenot.com if you need a login.)

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I finally got as far as reading this article. :) It's very apropos. Many of the old classics are great books, but they're dusty, smelly, and hardcover, with old illustrations. The kids don't glance at them.