Upstate Schools Consortium: Penny Kittle

One of my favorite books about secondary reading is Book Love by Penny Kittle, so I was pumped to find out that she would be speaking at Furman University for the Upstate Schools Consortium. Some of my takeaways from her presentation include:

• book stack day-students stack up the books they've read that year and take picture. This would be fun to do on first day and take pics of their first book choice, around mid year and at the end of the year.
• her recommendations for reading is 50% independent reading, 25% book club/lit circles in class, 25% core texts. I shared this with our teachers because I'm afraid this is no where close to what is happening in our classrooms.
• 4 Things Empower Readers & Writers: volume, choice, modeling, feedback
• series readers become adult readers. She mentioned a boy that started with Hatched then read all of Paulsen. She knew she would need to push him though because boys want to read about a protagonist that is around 2 years older than themselves.
• Her breakdown for time on reading is roughly 1-9 weeks independent reading, 10-12 book club, 13-16 core text, 17-18 independent, 19-21 book club, 22-24 independent, 25-27 independent, 28-32 core, 33-36 book club. 
• She and Kelly Gallagher have a new book, 180 Days. Just added to my next order. Can't wait to read and share.
• her formula for finding your reading rate. Can be found in Book Love.
• book talk essentials: hold the book, know the book, read a short passage, keep records, accept help, remember how important your "blessing" a book can be.
• suggested conference questions found in Book Love and book club thought log questions: pennykittle.net Resources/WorkshopHandouts/BookClubs
• Connect with another class. She mentioned using shared Google docs and Flipgrid. She mentioned a connection with college students. I've since made contact with a nearby college and we are in the planning stages of connecting our book club/lit circles with her Adolescent Literature students. I'll share more as this project takes shape.
• She gave a shout out to her school librarian. Specifically, she mentioned her weekly book recommendations to staff. I currently put Loo Reviews in faculty bathrooms and change those monthly. Maybe I can do weekly recommendations on Smore or a similar tool next year.

If you ever have the opportunity to hear her speak, I highly recommend it. She was inspiring and encouraging. If you haven't read her book, what are you waiting for?

NYT Bestselling Author, Nic Stone

I was very excited to hear that our local, public library was hosting author, Nic Stone, in their Main branch as part of their Black History Month celebrations. I shared the event information with my faculty, students and especially, our book club. Lucky for me, the library staff saw my tweets sharing the event and contacted me to find out if I would be interested in having her visit our school that day.
Yes!!
I quickly ordered and shared more copies of Dear Martin and made posters advertising her visit during our lunch times. One of my teachers brought her entire class and we had a good turn out from book club members and other students. She was a very engaging, relatable speaker. She shared her inspirations for the book and how it connects to race relations in our country today. The teacher that brought her class said that the discussion continued when they returned to the classroom. Honestly, these are discussions that need to be happening in our rural, conservative, mostly white school. I was honored to meet her and so excited that the Anderson County Public Library arranged for her visit. Twitter works, people! And be sure to build those connections with your local library.

March Book Madness

This year I was excited to try something that I'd seen online several times, March Book Madness. I went with the list provided on this website because the resources were premade and ready to go.

I made these fliers and invited teachers to come in. I had several Freshman Academic Enrichment classes sign up and one of my English teachers. I wasn't able to drag this out and have voting going on for a long time so for each class we started with a Google Form with the pairs then I edited another Google Form after each vote until we got to the Finals. It was interesting to see the variations among the classes. I had 3 copies of each book available and by the end of the class meetings, they were gone. Score!
We watched book trailers before each pairing and the teacher posted the Google Forms in their Google Classrooms for easy access. The Youtube playlist is here. As a bonus, every student submission entered their name into a drawing for a book prize pack. The winning student's teacher also won a prize. The student and teacher received a set of the Blacktop books. The student prize basket also included some candy and Gatorade. As each teacher brought in their class, I had them fill out a bracket predicting which books would win the face-offs. Mrs. Rains and Ms. Moye tied for the best bracket with 10 correct predictions. They each won a book for their classroom including, After the Shot Drops, an ARC I won on a Twitter giveaway.

The winning student was Christian and his teacher, Ms. Moye. Overall, Scythe by Neal Shusterman was the winning book. The awesome trailer didn't hurt. I really enjoyed this program and so did the students. Next year I may choose my own Sweet 16 based on our state award list or popular titles in our library.

#SCASL18 presentations

You can find my presentation slides for SCASL 18 here.

Be the Change

Librarian as Tech

Getting Ready to Promote 18-19 YABA Nominees

Getting the new SC Association of School Librarian lists for book award nominees is always exciting. I immediately got ours ready with new stickers and ordered plenty of copies.


Another task that I began was contacting authors to arrange visits next year. So far I have 4 confirmed Skype visits and one in-person visit in the works. I'm very excited about connecting with these authors.

Believe it or not, I'm already working on summer reading plans. I hope to include several of these titles into our plans and will be promoting them throughout the summer and school year.

I would love to hear how you promote your state award lists.

Here is an elink.io of all the books.

Author Visit with Corrie Wang

A friend of mine works closely with the Read Up Greenville book event and he was kind enough to connect me with SC author, Corrie Wang. I ordered copies of her debut, The Takedown, for my book club members and arranged for her to visit us.


She was gracious enough to spend most of the day with us. First, she had lunch with our book club and chatted, then she talked with our Creative Writing classes, and at the end of the day, we had an assembly in the auditorium open to all classes. This was the first author visit in our school for many, many years. We were so excited to have her and the students loved her laid back personality. We are looking forward to reading her next novel.

Forensics Project Update

I blogged earlier this year about the Forensics project that one of our teachers does with students. I love this idea. Here are a few pics of the students' working.


These went on display in the library when they were complete so students could vote for their favorite.
Next year I'm working with this teacher again using one of our newly released YABA nominated books for 2018-2019.

I ordered a class set of Blood, Bullets, and Bones by Bridget Heos. The Forensics class will be reading the book next year and Skyping with the author in November. I'm very excited to promote a great YABA book and work with this teacher again. This will be my first Skype with a nonfiction author so I'm looking forward to hearing about her research and writing process.