Poetry Out Loud

We are privileged and excited to be participating in the Poetry Out Loud National Recitation Contest this year. 3 teachers have volunteered their classes for this pilot project for Monroe District. We are going to memorize and recite many different poems, and each classroom winner will recite in the PAC in January for our school competition. The winning student will travel to Tallahassee in March to participate at the state finals.

Poetry is an important and beautiful part of literature, but one that unfortunately, many students do not fully appreciate. Memorizing a poem and reciting it helps us better understand and love poetry. Poetry is after all, meant to be spoken aloud, like music. This will be a fun way to further our knowledge of poetry and learn to speak in public.

New class project

Take a look at http://www.frysbookclub.blogspot.com and see what Ms. Fry and I are working on with her students! The students are reading and responding to questions that are posted biweekly. The questions are based mainly upon class reading, but some weeks will require them to think about their reading log or recreational reading books. Students are also responding to their classmates. The first week the question was about their favorite books, and we had quite a discussion going on about The Giving Tree, The Outsiders, and of course, Twilight!

Generation Dead by Daniel Waters

What would you do if the dead don't stay dead? All over America, dead teenagers are coming back to life. Nobody knows why. They are trying to act like regular kids, they go to school and listen to music. But people are not prepared to accept the living impaired or differently biotic. Instead, they call them zombies, corpsicles or dead heads.

Phoebe isn't sure what to think of the differently biotic kids at her school. There's Collette, a former friend of hers whom she hasn't talked to since she died. And then there's Tommy. For some reason, Phoebe can't explain it, she's interested in Tommy Williams. Tommy isn't your regular differently biotic kid. He can talk and move faster and he's trying out for the football team, which goes over real well at prejudiced Oakvale High.

As Phoebe and Tommy become friends, she unknowingly draws her other friends into the tensions surrounding the differently biotic and traditional kids. As the violence against the dead kids grows, Phoebe, Tommy, and their friends try to promote peace and tolerance.

But there are some who believe the dead should stay dead, and they're out to permanently kill all of the Generation Dead.

Teen Read Week

Come celebrate Teen Read Week at the library Oct. 12 through Oct. 18. We have lots of Books With Bite!

Teen Read Week celebrates the right of teens to read for fun and is sponsored by the Young Adult Library Association. Come by and check out a fun vampire or creature book to celebrate with. Remember, reading is fun and also helps you learn!

Don't forget to vote for the Teens Top Ten. This is the only national book list that is chosen by teens. There are some great books nominated, so be sure to go to http://http//www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/yalsa/teenreading/teenstopten/teenstopten.cfm and choose your favorite.

Have fun reading Books With Bite!

FAME conference

Wow, what a conference. I enjoy going to the Florida Association of Media in Education conference each year. I always learn a lot that I can use to improve the Media center and this year's conference was no exception. It was last week at the Gaylord Palms hotel in Kissimmee and the theme was Intellectual FREADom.

First up was a morning spent with Joyce Valenza, school librarian extraordinaire. She showed us how to use Web 2.0 technologies in our media centers and collaborating with teachers. I am familiar with some technologies such as blogs and wikis, but her session took things a step further and demonstrated how students can actively participate in their learning by using these applications. I also learned about iGoogle and how to tailor it to classroom and professional learning. (I hope I can access that here with our filters...). Photo and image sites, making video sites, and other open access sites were all demonstrated. Her view is "Learning is all about opening boxes" and it is our job to open boxes for our students. Very inspiring!

A high point of library conferences is the opportunity to meet authors. I was lucky enough to meet Marc Aronson, Lois Lowry, Chris Crutcher, and Susan Beth Pfeffer. Lois Lowry and Chris Crutcher have been challenged many times and they are huge proponents of the Freedom to Read. Susan Beth Pfeffer discussed how she came to write her Florida Teens Read book, Life as We Knew It. Apparently she enjoyed writing it and having the world come to an end. Excellent book, by the way.

I also went to sessions on writing in the media center, using bibliographies and book lists to hook readers and collaborate with teachers, and using blogs and wikis with Florida Teens Read books. Plus, I had my Florida Teens Read committee meeting. I also wished I had an unlimited budget when it came time to visit the exhibit hall. I am looking forward to sharing what I learned with my students and teachers.

Here's looking forward to next year!

A Young Reader

Here's a picture of one of the youngest Coral Shores community members, my daughter Kirby. She already loves books, and will look at the pictures in them for up to 20 minutes per page. If I'm reading, she wants to read the same thing. I have more pictures of her in the Library Media Center (I'm such a proud first-time mother!).

Florida Teens Read 2008-2009

What a great list we have for Florida Teens Read this year! Unfortunately, I was unable to be at the final meeting where we narrowed down the list due to the birth of my daughter, but all of the books are very strong choices. Here they are:

Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
A Long Way Gone (Mature Themes) by Ishmael Beah
Avalon High by Meg Cabot
The Nature of Jade by Deb Caletti
City of Bones by Cassandra Clare
Deadline by Chris Crutcher
The Christopher Killer by Alane Ferguson
What Happened to Cass McBride? by Gail Giles
Incantation by Alice Hoffman
A Thousand Splendid Suns (Mature Themes) by Khaled Hossani
Firestorm by David Klass
Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr
Street Love by Walter Dean Myers
Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Boot Camp by Todd Strasser

We currently have several titles, and mulitple copies of all the FTR books will be arriving next week. Remember, once you have read 3 books, you may vote for your favorite online in April. Come let me know which is your favorite!

Florida Teens Read winner

Hi, I'm a little late but the winner of the 2007-2008 Florida Teens Read award was Uglies by Scott Westerfield. Second place went to Just Listen by Sarah Dessen. Both books were very popular here at CSHS and so I am not surprised that they garnered the most votes. Every book was good, and many students were reading them. Congratulations to the few students who read every book on the list!

It's FCAT time!

It's FCAT time again...

Once more, the State of Florida will be consumed by standardized testing. FCATs will take place over the next two weeks. Testing will be taking place in the media center, which will be closed for the duration. (Hopefully we will be able to open the last block most days, depending on when students finish their tests). The book return box will be outside the library and students should ask their teachers to email us if they require a certain book.

Thanks for understanding, and good luck everyone!

Library Baby Contest

The library media center is going baby crazy. Next week will be my last week before my maternity leave, and all the students are trying to guess whether I will have a boy or a girl. It's great to hear all their predictions and reasons why it is a boy or a girl. Entry forms for the official contest are due next week, and the prize is no library late fees until the baby's first birthday. Several students are quite interested in that! Stay tuned to this space for baby pictures later in April.

Romance Contest

For the month of February, we held a Matchmaker's Romance contest. Students were asked to match literary couples together with their books. This was a tough one, as there was not a single student who had read every book on the list. I had not even read them all! But they worked hard to find out all the correct couples and titles. Molly was our winner and received a Starbucks gift card and some chocolate. Congratulations to Molly and everyone who entered!

Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay

Ned Marriner is feeling babied. He's in Provence, France, where his dad, a famous photographer is taking pictures for a book. His mother is in Darfur where she is a doctor with Doctors Without Borders. Normally Ned would love the chance to get out of school and help his dad but he's worried about his mom and he feels that his dad's assistant is treating him like a little child. Melanie has researched all sorts of things for him to do as if he can't take care of himself. But Ned's irritation at Melanie is replaced by fear when he walks into the old chatedral his dad is shooting picures of.

Inside he meets an American exchange student named Kate. And then a strange man climbs out of a grate on the floor, carrying a knife, and tells them to go away because he has killed children before. The weird part is Ned knows things about this man such as where he is when he can't even see him. Then the man follows him and Kate to a cafe the next day where dogs attack them. Needless to say, Ned is getting very freaked out by all this. When his long estranged Aunt Kim shows up, Ned is anxious for answers.

Apparently Ned has been drawn into a story from long ago about two men who are desperate to kill the other in order to have the woman the both love, Ysabel. Even though Ned has been warned, repeatedly, to not get involved, somehow he can't resist. But by trying to find out the answers to what he's feeling, he ends up potentially endangering Kate, his family, and even his dad's assistants. Now, the only way to help them all is to find the mysterious Ysabel, and maybe, just maybe, Ned will also learn the truth about himself.

New Books

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. Sometimes I have problems getting to the sign in page for Blogger, I don't know if it is our filters or not.

Okay, on to the news. We have been getting boxes of new books in lately. We have new manga titles such as D.N. Angel and GodChild. We have a set of college football books, and some new forensic science books as well. New fiction titles include Avalon High by Meg Cabot, Deadline by Chris Crutcher, Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay, Red Spikes by Margo Lanagan, and Looking for J.J. by Anne Cassidy. Keep looking at our new book shelf as more books are arriving all the time.

Happy reading!

Books donated to Library!

Thanks to the hard work of the Environmental Academy, noted underwater photographer Ned DeLoach and his wife Anna came to speak and show examples of his work to some of our science students. Their photographs are absolutely stunning. Some were of fish that are rarely seen. They also donated a full set of their Caribbean Fish Identification and Behavior books to the Library Media Center. In the picture above are Anna DeLoach, Environmental Science Teacher Alesa Rehmann, Jodie Delgado, and Ned DeLoach. Thank you for the wonderful books and addition to our Florida section!

50 books and counting...

Okay, somehow I have to find time to read 51 books for the Florida Teens Read committee. I'm on this committee, otherwise known as the "Fun" committee, which it is! The committee members are high school media specialists from around Florida who read lots and lots of teen books (and some adult) for the Florida Teens Read list. I am very happy and proud to be on this committee, although I do admit I have been remiss in my reading lately!

The books that we are reading now have already made the first cut. At our FAME conference we met to go through the original list and narrowed down the titles under consideration. Now, each book must be read a majority of the committee in order to be considered for our final list, which will be determined later in the school year. Which leaves me with a lot of reading.

The books are of many different genres and styles, which I'm enjoying. I have read several titles that I probably would never have picked up, and they are all good, although still not my favorites. It is great to be exposed to so many quality books for teens, and I want them all for the media center. Now, I'd better get back to my books...

Boot Camp by Todd Strasser

Garrett is in big trouble. Just because he feel in love with his teacher who is eight years older, his parents have sent him away to Harmony Lake, a boot camp for troubled teens in upstate New York. Forget all you've heard about boot camps, the reality is ten times worse.

Harmony Lake's purpose is to make kids obedient to their parents. Harmony Lake does this by stripiping away every right and dignity thier prisoners possess, and also by encouraging other kids to beat up the ones that don't conform. It's a brutal system, and it works. Garrett is finding out that nothing he does is right, and there is no faking compliance.

After being beaten repeatedly, put in Temporary Isolation too many times too count, and humiliated beyond belief, Garrett is wondering whether maybe, just maybe, he should think about giving in to these people. Otherwise he'll be here until he's eighteen, and that's several long years away.

But two inmantes have other ideas. Pauly and Sarah have been at Harmony Lake for almost two years, and although they've been beaten, their spirit is not broken. They've come up with a plan to escape. An incredibly stupid, risky plan. But the need Garrett's help. Is the freedom to be yourself worth the risk? Garrett isn't sure anymore, not after months of torture and brainwashing at Boot Camp.

Thank you to the School Advisory Council

The School Advisory Council voted on Tuesday night to donate just over $1000 to the Library Media Center to purchase new books and several playaway audio books. SAC has always been a great supporter of the LMC, and their help is greatly appreciated. I understand how difficult it is to fulfill many school requests with limited funds, and the committee went over each request in detail to determine where the funds could be used to benefit the school community the most. The money given to the media center is a huge boost to our budget and the students will enjoy the newest titles. Thanks to the support from the SAC and the teachers present.

Class book blog

I am very happy to be working with Ms. Pez and one of her English classes on a book blog. You can see it at http://www.pezbookgroup.blogspot.com. The students are answering questions about the different books they are reading. So far we have been having problems accessing the blog with the new school filters, but the studnets have been posting some good comments. I thing using blogs and other web 2.0 tools are a great way of engaging students. What do you think?

Teen Read Week

Come celebrate Teen Read Week, LOL @ Your Library! Regardless of what you may have heard, teens are still reading, and this week we celebrate that! The library media center has some great new books, including: What My Girlfriend Doesn't Know by Sonya Sones, the new Tolkien The Children of Hurin, Blue Bloods a new vampire series by Melissa De La Cruz, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, a series about cars, and craft books on knitting, beading, and scrapbooking.

During Teen Read Week, teens are invited to go online and vote for their favorite books in the annual Teens' Top Ten poll at www.ala.org/teenstopten. This is the only national list sponsored by the American Library Association and their Young Adult division YALSA that is nominated and voted on by teens.

During Teen Read Week, the Environmental Academy and our Reading Coach sponsored an environmental literacy day with a guest speaker, Dr. Ellen Prager of the Aquarius Reef Project to speak to our students. An environmentally themed art show is currently displayed in the library media center.

Florida Teens Read 07-08

It's time again to read the Florida Teens Read list. This list of 15 books has a variety of genres, authors, themes etc. to appeal to everyone. The deal is, once you read a minimum of 3 books, you get to vote for your favorite in April. The winning author gets receives his/her award at the annual FAME conference for media specialists in October.

You can find more information at http://www.floridamedia.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=12

This year the fifteen titles are:

Hit the Road by Caroline Cooney, The Last Apprentice: Revenge of the Witch by Joseph Delaney, Just Listen by Sarah Dessen, Runner by Carl Deuker, Copper Sun by Sharon Draper, Rash by Pete Hautman, Crossing the Wire by Will Hobbs, 13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson, If I Have a Wicked Stepmother, Where's My Prince? by Melissa Kantor, Sleeping Freshman Never Lie by David Lubar, Sold by Patricia McKormick, Uglies by Scott Westerfeld, Becoming Chloe (mature reader) by Catherine Ryan Hyde, Black and White (mature reader) by Paul Volponi, and Glass Castle (mature reader) by Jeannette Walls.

As for my predictions, sci fi/fantasy has always been popular and therefore I vote for Uglies. Just Listen is also extremely popular, and Sarah Dessen's books never remain on the shelf for long. We'll see if I'm right in May. Remember, my favorite usually never wins!