The Book Charmer

I'll be honest: I haven't been very good at accomplishing my goals for November. Hey, we're all human. The midterms just kept rolling in. But I've been lucky to stay involved at Edison Elementary, and I hope I can take on more hours, now that my class load has been reduced by half next term!

What I've gotten done recently:

- THIS MAP! I spent a few hours designing this in Illustrator, while my friends screamed at a college football game out in the living room. It's absolutely not perfect, but much better than the map created in Microsoft Word out of circles and rectangles. I improved on the original by making all of the text as easy to read as possible. I wanted the volunteer to be able to look at it straight on and be able to read all the section headers. With the exception of the Reference and Ready, Set, Read books on the left side that I had no control over, none of the text requires you to turn your head around to read what it says.

Patti was thrilled at how it turned out and is thinking of blowing it up for the children to use! I may have another map to make over break...

Edison Elementary Library Map 

- Oregon Battle of the Books is a statewide reading motivation and comprehension competition sponsored by the Oregon Association of School Libraries for students in 3rd-12th grade. Students form teams to read a set of books for their grade level and answer questions about them in rapidly paced school, regional, and statewide tournaments. It's like trivia or debate for bookworms.

Edison is holding mock battles in December and January, so I'm reading as many of the 16 books for 3rd-5th graders as possible, in order to create practice questions for the students. I've read Charlotte's Web, 11 Birthdays, and am now onto Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and Who Are The Beatles? (lol, right?) for Thanksgiving break. I wish we had this kind of project when I was young! It's nice to see so many kids clamoring to participate in a competition about books. I'm a little concerned that they place too much focus on memorization, but if it gets kids to read and leads to analysis, then alright.

So a month in, and I'm still loving it.