A Reading Pep Talk for Teachers

On Friday at 11am, I was standing in front of our staffroom looking out over our entire teaching staff and wondering why I suggested that I talk about our library and reading.  It was a situation of my own making and my nerves were causing me to question my decisions.  However, I soldiered on, and got through my twenty minute talk without any major social embarrassment.  Now that it is over I do think it was worth doing, and I'm grateful that management gave me the opportunity.  It did take a while to make slides, but at least that meant for some of the time attention was directed on something other than me!  I thought I would share my slides so if you are in a similar situation at some point you can borrow some or all of them and reduce your preparation time.

I spent the first ten minutes going over the changes that we have made to the library over the holidays.  Information about that is here.  I haven't included those slides because they're very school-specific.

The second part of the talk was on why reading for pleasure and reading aloud are awesome and why some of them need to do more of it!  I mentioned that the two latest staff members to get promoted to DP, one at our school and one nearby, were both REALLY huge readers of children's books, so that was obviously good for their careers!

Our DP and I are interested in the idea of developing our own Reading Spine so I introduced that.  I hope to be able to meet up with individual teams during the year to discuss this more with them.  

I made sure to add that I meant the last slide FIGURATIVELY :)

Picture Book Shelving Arranged by Subject - Finishing the Job

The sorting process begins

Two years ago, we introduced a partial rearrangement of our picture book shelves.  This has been highly successful.  So successful that we felt it was time to fully commit so that our students can more easily find the books they want.  I blogged last week about how running a click and collect service last year reminded us that our students are looking for 'funny books' or 'princess books' and therefore arranging books by author surname is not very helpful for them.  When we first arranged books by subject, I only did it for some books and left the A-Z system in place for the rest because I was worried about "trying to get all the books to fit neatly into the subject areas when there is the potential for lots of overlaps".  But you know, if a book can be in multiple places you just pick the area you think it fits in best.  In fact, the biggest problem I had was with a couple of books that didn't quite fit properly in the categories we had.  Again though, the closest fit is the best choice and the world isn't going to end if it's not a perfect match.

We have a lot of building work going on at our school over the holidays, so for the first time since 2013, the library is not open over summer.  What perfect timing for a giant summer genre project!  Actually, because we like our projects BIG in our library, we have decided to 'genre-fy' the quick picks (early chapter books), readers, graphic novels and sophisticated picture books too.  That way all the fiction in the library is arranged by genre/subject.  This means that thousands of books will need to sorted, scanned into their new genres and stickered.  New stickers and shelf labels will need to be made.  Luckily, I have Esther, our Library and Resource Assistant, to help as otherwise I would get no holidays!

I did a bit of online research and also considered the genre categories we already have in our chapter book area (I can't believe it was 2014 when I 'genre-fied' this area).  I felt that keeping the same categories and stickers made sense in helping students find the same kinds of books they like as they get older.  We did simplify some of the genre names for the younger kids.  For example, our Horror genre has become 'Scary Stories'.  We've changed our Realistic Fiction genre to 'Friends and Family', not only because younger kids will understand this better, but also because of the large number of picture books that use anthropomorphic animals to tell friendship stories.  It did not feel right describing these as 'realistic' or as 'animals' (as the latter category is for "real" animals doing animal things).

Our Picture Book Categories

Firstly, we have the existing categories:

• Maths & Concepts

        Maths - includes counting, time, shapes
        Concepts - includes colours, patterns, opposites, size, perspectives

• English

        -  includes reading, writing, ABCs, creativity and using your imagination

• Historical (this used to be part of English but it had enough books to be on its own, it is also a fiction genre)

• Nature 

        - includes birds and the environment but no longer has animals

• Science & Technology 

        - includes inventing, internet safety, engineering

• Wordless Picture Books

• Maori Culture & Language 

        - includes bilingual

• Feelings & Life Issues 

        - includes mindfulness

• Fairy Tales & Fractured Fairy Tales

• Diverse Books 

        - includes different cultures, special needs, different types of families

Next, we have the categories based on our fiction genres:

• Mystery

• Adventure

• Friends & Family (similar to Realistic Fiction)

• Sports

• Scary Books (Horror)

• Fantasy

• Space & Robots (Science Fiction)

• Funny Books (Humour)

• Animals

• Classics

Finally, we have some new categories especially for our younger readers:

• Princesses

• Transport

• Famous Faces

        - includes TV & movie tie-ins, series books

• Superheroes

• Celebrations

So, there are 25 categories, which is quite a lot, but it's still one less than the letters in the alphabet!  I'm looking forward to finishing off this area and seeing how our students respond to it once school starts again in February.

Working out what goes where

5 Positive Things from 2021

 I think we can all agree it was a challenging year, so I thought I would share five positive things that happened in 2021.

1.  We got a school support dog, Milo, who is based in my office.  I wrote about the first steps and the first full week.  I brought Milo in for about three or four mornings a week, taking him home at lunchtime.  That worked well for us.  I was fortunate to find a very willing teacher who looked after Milo during morning tea two or three times a week when I was taking a book club or Lit Quiz group.  On the odd occasion I had a work meeting she took Milo to her classroom.  It was good to have one other key person that Milo could hang out with when I needed to focus on other things.  He adores her because she brings her own treats!

We got in Darran Rowe, a dog trainer who runs Mindfulness4Dogs.  He helped me train Milo and showed me how to work with classes.  We had plans to film some dog safety videos and run a parent night, but these were postponed due to the lockdown and will hopefully happen early this year.

Milo has had a wonderful effect on students and staff.  I would run into parents and they would tell me how much their child liked coming to school because there was a dog there.  Staff would come in to give Milo some attention if they were feeling a bit stressed.  Classes drew pictures and wrote about Milo - there were two pages in the Yearbook dedicated to him!  Here is one lovely sentence from a Year 4 student - "His fur is brown like chocolate and feels as soft as a blanket that I want to snuggle forever".

Sometimes a teacher would ask if a particular student could come in and read to Milo during their library visit, as they were having a bad day.  The calming effect he had on them was an awesome thing to be part of.  And of course, when students read to Milo it gave me a chance to connect more with those students and discuss which books they were reading.

Not a library book, a teacher's personal copy.

2.  We entered two teams in the Kids' Lit Quiz for the first time.  I hadn't even been to the heats before but it was so much fun (our students enjoyed it too!).  We're a contributing school so our Year 6s were competing against a lot of Year 8 teams, but that just meant there was no pressure.  There are lots of things I can improve on now that I have actually seen the Lit Quiz in action, and I am looking forward to being involved with this again this year.  I also attended a SLANZA online presentation by librarian Alan Dingley sharing how he runs his Lit Quiz group and picked up lots of ideas and enthusiasm!  

3.  I started a book club for some Year 4 reluctant readers.  This was an initiative interrupted by two lockdowns and a school policy not to mix students from different 'pods'.  However, I did learn a lot from the few weeks we did meet, and I am keen to build on this.  Some things I noted:

• Some of the students were a lot keener than I thought they would be, based on how many books they were borrowing from the library.  I had two sisters in my group, who turned up the very next Monday wanting to see Milo and also asked me to run the club on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays!  Three students, when asked 'How do you feel about reading?" on my reading survey, ticked the box that said "I love reading, it's the best thing in the universe" and no-one ranked it lower than "Reading is okay, I guess".
• Having Milo in attendance was a big drawcard (the group called themselves the "Midnight Milos"), as was giving students the ability to take an extra book out.
• I had the students pick out books from the Scholastic Book Club pamphlets and then I bought them for the library.  This was very motivating for them, with the added benefit of providing an insight into the type of books that they found interesting.
• Other noteworthy survey results:
• Most students were choosing books based on the title or the cover.
• While some teachers were reading aloud every day, others fell into the once a week or less than once a week category.  I will be giving the teachers a pep talk at their Teacher Only day in a couple of weeks!

4.  At the end of the year, we ran a click and collect service.  This wasn't a huge undertaking, and did not run for very long, however I was pleased that the Google form I designed worked well.  We enjoyed selecting books for students based on their requests and it was heartening when parents sent in photos of their children reading or indicated on their next request form that their child had become hooked on a series we had started them on.  One thing that became apparent was that when students asked for funny picture books or Quick Picks (our early chapter books), or princess books or picture books about cars, we couldn't easily find these books in our shelves arranged A-Z by author surname.  This has led to a 2022 project, which I will post more about soon.

5.  We did a massive weed of books while "bubble school" was happening, and it felt liberating!  I went through every book in the library and checked inside and outside for wear and tear, and made a huge pile of books to check if I felt I hadn't seen them get issued much (or at all).  I am freshening up some of the very popular titles, I retired lots of others and moved some that only teachers ever seem to want to our "archives" section in the resource room.

So, I had some nice moments in 2021 and I am very excited about the projects I have planned in 2022.  My hours of work, which were decreased over the past two years, are back to their usual levels and I am thankful that I will be able to interact much more with a wider range of students.  Of course, we don't know what else the world is going to throw at us, but I'll deal with that as it comes.