It's been a while since I did a Currently post and linked up with Farley over at Oh Boy, Fourth Grade! Here's what I'm currently thinking about today...be sure to link up to see some other great blogs!
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This past March, one of my best friends Missy and I found out we both were the lucky recipients of a 2013 Honeywell Educators Space Camp scholarship! That means we both get to attend Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama FREE for an entire week this month! They even pay for our flights, lodging, and meals! Huzzah! We leave at the end of June! It has been a dream of mine to attend space camp since I was in elementary school myself. You can read more about the first time I applied for this scholarship and my excitement for Space Camp here. Missy and I are beyond excited! We even went shopping over the weekend to stock up on some "goodies" for Space Camp! I knew they had this NASA t-shirt at Target and I had to make it mine! Check out these shoes! They are AMAZING! I can't wait to run in them all around Space Camp! Plus, my new school color is purple so they will be perfect for spirit days next school year! Missy and I plan on blogging throughout our Space Camp experience to share our adventures with the world! Check out our blog: kellyandtackettatspacecamp.blogspot.com It's going to be out of this world! Sorry, I couldn't resist!
One of the things in elementary education that I'm most excited about diving back into is reading books. I MISS BOOKS! In science class, I rarely had the opportunity to talk with my kiddos about reading (except for nonfiction). I can't wait for read alouds, character analysis...you name it! However, I knew building my classroom library would be difficult...and expensive! I have lots of primary-aged books in my house (and I plan on keeping those for future baby Tacketts someday) but I had hardly any upper elementary fiction or nonfiction books on hand. Luckily, several reading teachers in my building gave me several books and my amazing librarian gave me all of the new Mark Twain Award Nominee books from this past year and next year. I was off to a good start, but knew I had a long way to go before my classroom library would have enough of a variety. Then, last week my friend Bridget asked me if I wanted to go to a Book Fair sponsored by the library district in our area. You could fill up an entire shopping bag of books and pay only $5 a bag! I was in! When Bridget, our friend Amanda (they are both High School English teachers), and I got inside the convention center where the Book Fair was held, it was like a book-lovers paradise. They had thousands of books in every genre you could imagine. It took us a while to spot the elementary aged books, but once we found them, I dove in and searched for the perfect books to add to my new classroom library! I ended up leaving with over 80 books and spending only $15! I am ecstatic! We did decide that next year we would be more prepared and bring a rolling cart since our arms were killing us from dragging so many books around all day!
Since then, I've been exploring different ways to organize my classroom library. I know I'm going to separate books by genre in plastic bins, and I think I'm going to use a card system like this one here (honestly, what did people do before Pinterest?) to help me keep track of the locations of my books. I also downloaded an awesome app called BooksApp that allows you to scan the ISBN of any book and input the book's information (title, pages, author, genre) into your phone. I plan on using this app to help me categorize books into genres! Best of all, it's free! :) Anyone have any classroom library tips? Any tried and true systems? Are you following me on Pinterest? |
About MeTeacher of leaders. Life-long learner. Space geek. Lover of all things color-coordinated, organized, and cutesy. Categories
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September 2015
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