Reading to Be a Better Writer

My administration requested that I put together a professional development session on how reading can help with writing skills. Writing is our focus this year so I was happy to help out.

This is what I put together.

For our activity, I purchased picture books that relate to the content of each department. You can see my notes and list here. Using the BHH strategy from Disrupting Thinking, the teachers are asked to use these sticky notes that I ordered from the Dollar Tree and respond to each category.

I hope to show them that incorporating reading and writing will not take away from teaching their content, it doesn't have to be time-consuming, and it can be fun. I also made this chart showing the many options for reading assignments (more than novels/textbooks) and writing assignments (more than essays).

Our instructional technologist is going to co-teach this with me and show them how to take a photo on the Chromebook, save it in Drive, and upload it to a Google Slides presentation. And possibly a few more Google tricks if we have time.

We have this scheduled for October. I'll let you know how it goes.

Library 101 Courses

At the request of my Freshman Academy, I created 5 lessons for our newest students. These lessons are to introduce them to library services and policies and help address some of the most common mistakes seen by our teachers during research projects.

Lesson One: Introduction

This is my "orientation", although really it is just me introducing myself, library programs and lessons, and information about our book club. The lesson ends with a genre quiz so that students can easily navigate our genrified fiction section.

Lesson Two: Plagiarism

This lesson was inspired by this post on Cult of Pedagogy. I saved an article from NewsELA called "How do owls see in the dark?". Each student is asked to read the article then take this Google Quiz.
We will review those questions after the quiz. Students will pair up and read another article from NewsELA and practice using the paraphrasing techniques in the Slides. I selected easy, non-controversial articles so that the focus was on plagiarism and paraphrasing and not reading ability.

Lesson Three: MLA Citation
I turned my MLA citation into a Goosechase game. You can find all of my clues here. This lesson should make citation a little more fun. If you have more questions about Goosechase, contact me.

Lesson Four: Research Tools
Students will learn about tools that should make research easier, like Destiny Resource lists and SC DISCUS. Students will use our state databases to research a topic of their choosing, practice paraphrasing techniques, and complete this template in Docs.

Lesson Five: Fake News
Students will complete this Fake News Digital Breakout that I made with the help of my instructional technologist. They'll use sites like Factitious, Edpuzzle, and a news bias chart to solve the clues and break out. Contact me if you'd like to see all of the parts and pieces so you can make your own.

We've already started these lessons and they are going well so far. I'd love to hear how you help your freshmen adjust to high school.

Banned Books Week 2018

This year I put together a lesson for Banned Books Week. Luckily, teachers enjoyed the lesson last year so I already have some classes signed up for the lesson at the end of September.

The lesson starts with watching this short video.

Then students create a book selfie with a banned or challenged book (from a cart that I prepulled). I created a template in Slides to make it easy.

The second activity asks students to write a thank you tweet to an author of a banned or challenged book. Again, a template was made in Slides to speed up the activity.

Finally, students are asked to read this article about a SC issue with censorship. Using Kami on their Chromebooks students will highlight important details. 

Censorship is such an important issue and I look forward to these lessons each year.

District Teacher of the Year

I was thrilled to find out that I was chosen as the Teacher of the Year for my entire school district.
At our opening ceremony, the award was announced and I was able to give a short speech to all of our teachers and staff.



We were also honored with a luncheon where I was asked to speak to our school teachers of the year and support staff of the year.
I started that speech off by reading I Am A Story by Dan Yaccarino and sharing a bit of my own teaching story.


I asked that each teacher share a story. I made this with a few recommendations and encouraged them to share the stories they selected on this Padlet.
A focus of both speeches is a quote I modified to fit the teaching profession. I made it into an image using Canva and Adobe Spark. I shared these with my school and all of our school teachers of the year so that they could share with all of their faculty as well.

It is an honor to be selected and I will do my best to represent my school, district, and all school librarians in our competition for the state Teacher of the Year.

YAhooligans 18-19 1st quarter

I have posted about our YAhooligans program in the past. 
For our first quarter, our tech tool is Our Story, which led them to their reading assignment. 

Teachers were asked to watch the video explaining OurStory from "We Need Diverse Books" then scroll to the bottom of the page, click OurStory Teen, then under Explore, and click TAKE THE QUIZ. When they get the quiz results, they had to write down at least three titles from the list that sound interesting and share them as a comment in Google Classroom. When possible, they chose one of those books for the reading assignment.

We have 16 teachers signed up for the course this quarter.

Let's Taco Bout Books

This summer I challenged my teachers to read. All of the info can be found here.

To celebrate the ten teachers that completed the challenge, we got together during a staff development day and Taco Bout Books.

I bought Klondike Choco Tacos and we all shared the books we read over the summer. We filled up a board with sticky notes of titles. One of my teachers read something from every category so she won a Book Nerd hat from Out of Print. This was a fun way to reconnect after the summer.

Summer Book Giveaways 2018

In an effort to stay connected with my students and teachers over the summer, I'm doing book giveaways on our school library Twitter and Instagram accounts. @wrhslibrary


Each week I post a question. Each student and teacher that responds is entered into the giveaway. I am using Name Picker Ninja to choose the winner.


Here are my questions. I used Adobe Spark Post to create the images and Anyflip to put this together for sharing with you.


I'm using books that I've won on Twitter giveaways to offer this.