STAYING AFLOAT

You may be asking yourself why I choose this title for my blog post.  Is it because of the many hats I wear it school, or because of my life outside of school.  Well, not exactly...it is because of the rain that we have been having for the past few weeks.  The ground around my school is saturated.  I do not believe that it can handle another drop.  What do you think?  The picture below is from the breezeway leading into my media center.  We had to close for several hours on Tuesday until the water subsided.

I believe the turtles are swimming.

The following day was picture day.  Classes were assigned to come to the media center two at a time every 10 minutes.  Yes, I said the media center.  We have the only space large enough to set up for pictures that will not cause a disruption to our master schedule.  However, we do not close down the media center for circulation.  I would have to say that Wednesday was our busiest day so far this year.  We always have students rotating through the media center in pairs or small groups to check out books, but we had every student in the school come in over a three hour period of time.  All would have turned out perfectly if the photo company had brought the two cameras they told me they were bringing.  Having one camera cause major delays frustrations among several of our teachers.  Who could blame them?  I would not want a class of kindergartners waiting in a line for 20 to 30 minutes either.  My clerk and I selected books for them to use while they waited.  Everything turned out well.

You would think that with holiday on Monday, flooding on Tuesday,  and half a day used for pictures Wednesday that our circulation for the week would be down.  We still had 872 books checked out this week.  The collection report below shows which sections had the most use.

The 700's, Everybody fiction, and our chapter book fiction saw the most use.  I believe that this was due to us placing new books on the shelves in each of those areas.  Almost every new book that we put out on Wednesday afternoon was checked out by the end of the week.  Our numbers would have been smaller if we had not restricted the kids from getting multiple "new" books.  Normally i do not place restrictions on the students other than those set up by the district, but I wanted to make sure that as many students as possible were able to get a new book.  I am not sure why, but my patrons seem to feel that if a book is not new that it is not worth reading.  My clerk and I are struggling to change these feeling among our patrons.  I like to tell the kids when they ask for new books:

If you have not read it...It is new to you.

I think I will make a poster with that saying on it this week.

Tomorrow I will be hosting my first media and technology committee meeting of the year.  The  members of the team represent all areas of the school - grade level representatives, the administration, resource teachers and our exceptional children department.  My plan is to review the process for challenged materials, discuss technology needs for the school and present a proposal to have student IDs.  I will let you know in next week's post how the meeting goes.