Book Fair

It’s time for our annual Book Fair. As you can see from the pictures, the previews were a success and students are definitely excited for new books.

This is a great chance to pick up items on your holiday wish list or just browse and see what new titles are available.

Stop by and see how you can help foster a love of reading by donating items off a teacher’s wishlist. These books go towards making the classroom library a source of high-quality, fun reading materials for the students. Each book purchase will also help support the Chappell Media Center.

The Book Fair will open during Parent-Teacher conferences and before and after school on Thursday (11/19) and Friday (11/20).

If you can’t make it to the Book Fair, we also have an online option. Click on the link to access our online fair. Items will be delivered to the school and then delivered to each student.

We hope to see you here!

Library Shelfie

The shelves at the Chappell School Media Center are working overtime to hold up a variety of displays!

Of course, October always brings to mind Halloween. As you can see, we have a great selection of spooky stories that are perfect for reading aloud or under the blankets with a flashlight for protection.

    

What most people don’t know is that Hispanic Heritage Month is also celebrated from mid-September through mid-October. While the book displays always include Hispanic authors and characters throughout the year, it’s nice to have a chance to highlight them so they don’t get lost in the crowd, so to speak.

    

This year, we have a special display to celebrate the Chicago Cubs! I think we are all very excited to share in their success and we hope that our Cubbies will go all the way in the race for the pennant.

Welcome Back!

It’s been two weeks since the 2015-2016 school year has begun and the students here at Chappell are all settling down to a comfortable routine. We have been very busy in the Media Center and we’ve hit the ground running. Students are learning how to evaluate a variety of resources and create citations for them. In a remix culture, it is important for our students to learn why it is important to give credit where it is due.

Our little guys, the kindergarteners are learning to adjust to the school experience. Slowly, but surely, they are learning to get used to all of the different routines of the school, whether it is getting breakfast or lining up to come to the Media Center. Pretty soon, once they become familiar with all of the expectations, they will be receiving a book policy letter that explains the procedures and policies of the Media Center. They will need to get these signed by a parent/guardian and return them before they can begin checking books out.

Also, be on the lookout for library card applications for the Chicago Public Library. If your student already has a library card, that’s fantastic! However, for students without cards, this is a great opportunity to get a new card or to replace a missing card. The CPL will be waiving the usual card replacement fee, though any fines that were on the old account will remain intact and, until they are taken care of, some of the services that the public library has to offer may remain inaccessible.

In a couple of months, Book Fair will be upon us. Keep checking our school website or the library blog to get all the updates.

Winter Break News

During winter break, students in 6th-8th grades are expected to work on their What’s Next Illinois activities. They will go over their accounts and the activities this week in Media Center and, depending on their Winter Concert schedule, they will have some time to get started. However, it is highly encouraged that students spend the time necessary to complete each of these activities since they provide opportunities for students to think about careers, high school, and college.

After break, we are going to jump in with both feet as students begin their NWEA MAP tests. This will be the first of the assessments students will be required to complete in the second half of the school year. Among them will be the new PARCC test. There will be more information about that test as we learn more.

Keep checking back here for some recommended reading for the winter break.

Summarizing with Kindergarten

The kindergarten students have been very busy learning different reading strategies in their classrooms and also in the Library. Even though they missed a week of Library due to the ISAT testing, the students demonstrated just how eager they are to show what they know.

In the last few weeks of February, the students had been reading various books written by Dr. Seuss in order to prepare for his birthday, which they celebrated in their classrooms. In the Library, we learned about how to summarize the text by describing the events that happen in the beginning, middle, and end of the stories. This supplemented the lessons the students were learning in their regular classrooms.. All this culminated in the final activity where we read Green Eggs and Ham and we completed a worksheet where the students identified the title and the author. They also wrote down the characters and described the problem and the solution. After the ISAT, the students finished the activity by drawing and writing descriptions of the beginning, middle, and end of the stories.

Just for fun, we stayed on the carpet and used clipboards instead of sitting at our regular seats. The students enjoyed the novelty of the experience and worked so hard, they didn’t even talk to their neighbors even though they were bumping elbows!

I’m very proud of how hard the kindergarten classes worked this week.

ISAT stars

Today marks the third day of the ISAT’s and the students at Chappell are working very hard. Our students have always been great, but seeing them so dedicated to their success is even more wonderful.

All of last week, students participated in activities designed to encourage students and make them excited about this opportunity to demonstrate what they have learned. Every day, they listened to a song clip that matched our theme of ISAT Stars and guessed the title and artists (with a little help from the teachers). The class that guessed correctly won small prizes.

In addition, classes worked together to decorate their doors with the ISAT theme in mind. It was fantastic seeing the creativity of the decorations and the student collaboration that was required to put these doors together. Aside from helping with the materials, teachers did not really have a hands-on role in these doors. This was all done by the students.

The students had a week to complete their doors before a small group of teachers came around on Friday to judge the best doors. There were two classroom winners this year (picture below), both of whom will share the fabulous (the theme-related) prize. They will go to the Adler Planetarium and each of the students will receive a $10 gift certificate for the Unabridged Bookstore!

Congratulations to all of the students who worked hard last week! I hope that all of the students will continue to work hard and impress everyone by demonstrating how much you know. 

Winter Blues?

In what seems like Mother Nature’s attempt to make up for the previous year’s mild winter, this year’s cold and snow have seemed unrelenting, to say the least. When it’s too cold to go outside, snuggle inside with a good book.

Here are some recommended wintertime books. Unless stated otherwise, all images are from Amazon.com.

This is THE wintertime classic. Ezra Jack Keat’s delightful picture book is also one of the first to depict a person of color as a main character, a problem that continues to persist, unfortunately. This book does a wonderful job showing the readers the fun of being the first one to explore and make tracks in the fresh snowfall. The perfect book to read to little ones right before bed.

This is one of a series of Snowmen books, but they are all fun to read. All of them focus on the question: What do snowmen do when we aren’t looking? The rhyming text makes the book engaging to the little guys while the hidden objects turns reading into a fun game that everyone can engage in.

With just some fabric, paper, and other found objects, Lois Ehlert creates another charming book full of her signature collage-style artwork. The best thing about this book, aside from reading it, is that you and your family can create your own snowmen using materials found around the house.

One of the books in the Little House series, The Long Winter details the events of the harsh winter of 1880-1881. I remember reading this as a young girl and I could almost feel the cold seeping from the pages. This is a book to read while wrapped up in some blankets, sipping hot chocolate.

Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley had an inquisitive mind and a scientist’s soul. He used the relatively new technology of photography to capture the delicate beauty of snowflakes and created woodcuts to share that beauty with others. This nonfiction picture book is also a Caldecott winner and when you see the illustrations, it’s easy to see why.

Mark Cassino, who is actually a photographer, set out to create a wonderful book describing the science behind snow. Filled with beautiful photography and informative, but never boring, text, this is the perfect book for every young scientist.

Book Fair!

It’s time for report cards and parent conferences which means one thing for Chappell Library: Book Fair! Coming in just one week, the Book Fair will be in the Old Gym all day during parent conferences on November 12. Students will also be able to make purchases from 8:30a-4:30p (with teacher permission) on Wednesday, November 13. We will also run the fair before (8:00-8:45a) and after (3:45p-4:30p) on Thursday, November 14, which will be the final day of the Book Fair.

Can’t make it to any of the dates? Remembered a book that you wanted to purchase earlier but forgot about? Not to worry, the online Book Fair will be accessible through November 26. The same great selections you will see at the school-based book fair will also be available online. The best part is that all of your purchases, regardless of where and when you made them, will benefit the school library.

Bluestem Awards

Once again, Chappell students will be participating in the Bluestem Awards sponsored by the Illinois School Library Media Association (ISLMA). Unlike the Newbery and Caldecott Awards, the Bluestems are a Readers’ Choice Award, which means that the winner is selected by the students, the readers.

This is a great program for students to participate in. Although the minimum number of books they must read in order to vote is four, I highly encourage all of our students to read as much as they can, especially since Chappell was a Bluestem grant winner this year!

As a grant winner, we are entitled to a copy of each of the Bluestem titles and the students have made it abundantly clear how excited they are to participate again this year. The display that I set up didn’t even last long enough for me to take a picture of it!

The enthusiasm for the books is so great that the students are using their library catalog skills to put Holds on those that have already been checked. Even though it’s been only a week since we’ve gone over the Bluestem list, the students are already avidly checking the Holds list to see if their names are on them.

The students all received a copy of the 2014 Bluestem Nominees Master List, but it will be embedded below. The students are encouraged to utilize both the Media Center and the public library and read as many great books as they can before voting begins in February.

View this document on Scribd

Welcome to the new Media Center!

Actually, the new Media Center is located in the same room as the former Library. We’re transitioning to calling it the Media Center because we are now incorporating the separate computer lab in the Library space. Because we are combining both printed and digital media, it makes more sense to call this space the Media Center, rather than Library.

This process required a lot of work and cooperation from different people.

The building maintenance and custodial staff were on hand to help remove unnecessary or redundant items from both rooms while the technicians rewired the room, installed the computers, and ran scripts to make sure that everything would be working within the first week of school.

Words can’t really do justice to how much work went into creating a whole new space out of an existing one, so I’m going to let the following pictures speak thousands of words.

Empty room, empty shelves

Getting ready for the computers.

The nonfiction and elementary sections are shelved and in place.

The Reference section is shelved and awaiting the carpet and furniture for the Reading Area.

Finished room

Although most of the pieces are now in place, we are still waiting for some permanent tables and chairs to arrive for students who won’t be working in the computer area. However, the new space is looking great and it is a bright and cozy place of students to learn.