Students at John Lyman Elementary are embarking on an adventure! During library, the 3/4 students started reading the 1st chapter of The Great CT Caper. Other classes may be reading along in their classroom. 

The CT Humanities Council has an amazing adventure for us! Starting in January and being released every 2 weeks is a new chapter in the mystery. There will be 12 chapters in all, each written and illustrated by an author and illustrator from Connecticut. 

If you would like to read at home, click here and select the chapters link at the top.


For ideas and contests, click here.

For fun and games, click here.

One of the times of year that I look forward to most is World Read Aloud Day. It has turned into an exhausting week, but the fun we have more than makes up for that! This year we celebrated with 31 Skypes: 3 authors and 28 classes from around the United States. Part of the fun is meeting all these new friends and connecting with old ones! Many thanks to LitWorld for sponsoring this amazing event! 

Both of my schools had activities going on to celebrate Dr. Seuss's birthday throughout the week, starting off with Brewster's "Wheel of Seuss" on Friday which I had the honor of emceeing. Korn classes had many different guest readers coming in to share favorite books. Tuesday afternoon brought guest readers to Brewster School for Brewster Loves to Read. I love to see all of the different ways we show that we are communities of readers!

Bonus this year - no snow days! Happily we were able to fill in for schools who did have some winter weather to contend with!

What an amazing week and I am so grateful to all who were able to connect! These celebrations of reading and learning provide our students with the opportunity to communicate and collaborate, important abilities for our students to have as they go forward! But most importantly, it is just so much fun!

We had so much fun reading great picture books and sharing them with all kinds of friends this month. Especially fun was the Picture Book Smackdown on Google Hangout. What a fantastic way to share. Special thanks to Andy Plemmons, Cathy Potter, Shawna Ford, Kathy Kaldenberg and authors Laurel Snyder and Ame Dyckman.

UPDATE! On Thursday evening, Nov. 21, this project was funded! Amazing! Several families from our school community had supported the project and were matched by another donor. Then, Makerbot and a final family finished the funding. It is so exciting to imagine what we will be able to do and how many kids we will be able to inspire. Thank you, thank you.

Many of you know how passionate I am about Makerspaces, making, tinkering, and inventing. My children and I had an amazing summer "making" all kinds of things from soda bottle boats to balloon propelled lego cars and "throwies" made of LED bulbs and batteries to cardboard creations. We have been inspired by Caine of Caine's Arcade (please watch - it is so amazing!) I have read blogs and articles and am inspired daily by the book Invent to Learn by Martinez and Stager. I believe so much in the ideas of having students think, create, share, and grow. Creating a Makerspace in my school libraries is a huge goal that I am working toward this year. But I think it is worth it. Students deserve this opportunity.

Last week when I was at the American Association of School Libraries conference in Hartford, one of my good Twitter friends Andy Plemmons told me about an amazing opportunity from Makerbot and Donors Choose. They have teamed up with the goal of putting a 3D printer in every classroom! This is not a technology that is simply for colleges, universities, industry and other agencies to explore. This technology can be for everyone and what better way to move our students forward? Creating a Makerspace with this type of technology brings together what we do in the library every day - research, thinking, questioning, connecting with experts. All 21 century skills which will take our students places we can only imagine.

I submitted my proposal last night and it was accepted this afternoon. I am keeping my fingers and toes crossed that this project will be filled so that we can start thinking about how to use 3D printing and other Makerspace ideas. 

Please take a look at our project Follow Your Passion and Make It!, consider donating, and hopefully share about this project with others. I believe that our students will benefit in so many ways from this opportunity! I can't wait! 

If you are able to donate by 11/26, use the word INSPIRE at checkout and Donors Choose will match donations up to $100.

Inspired after reading Donalyn Miller's new book Reading in the Wild last week (and the latest Diary of a Wimpy Kid book birthday), I began talking to my 3rd and 4th grade classes about Reading Habits. Things that perhaps they never really thought about before - I certainly didn't. I shared with them how I "read around the edges" - with 2 kids and a job, I don't often have huge chunks of time for reading. They went off to think about their "edge" times and here are the results!

This post was a little delayed, but here it is . . .

Poems of all kinds were shared this week as classes from all over the United States celebrated Poem in Your Pocket Day. Many schools had spring break on April 18, the official Poem in Your Pocket Day, so we celebrated the following week instead. Some friends were well known to us, but we made some new friends as well. Many thanks to Laura D'Elia from Pine Glen School whose students shared many choral readings of poems.

Check out my animoto video for Poem in Your Pocket Day!

World Read Aloud Day 2013
One day simply wasn't enough - this turned into a week-long experience with 22 skypes, at least 16 schools, and 3 authors participating. There was snow, lots of it, which really threw our schedule into a tizzy. But mostly there was fun, great connections, and lots and lots of reading. Sometimes kids read, sometimes adults, and sometimes a combination of it all. The authors, Laurel Snyder, Abby Klein, and Lynn Plourde, were amazing! It is one of my favorite things to connect kids with an author and then see their books disappear from our library. Lynn Plourde even sent us a copy of her newest book, even though it was not quite a book yet. The 2nd graders were beyond excited.
I loved connecting with old friends and then making new ones too! New book titles were shared - both print and online versions of books were used! This was truly a mixture of everything that makes learning and the library amazing. I am lucky to be a part of it each and every day! Thank you to all the participants and the teachers and librarians who made this possible! Can't wait til next year!
Click HERE for a link to my #WRAD13 movie

It has taken me a few days to recover from this amazing conference - Massachusetts State Library Association conference 2012.  I was privileged to learn from some of my heroes of education, librarianship, and information literacy. We started on a Sunday morning in early March (after a 3 hour drive to Cape Cod) with Ross J. Todd, professor at Rutgers University. We had lunch with author Tim Green who reminded us of why we do what we do. The afternoon was all Alan November. Monday morning Joyce Valenza inspired me with a keynote followed by a session on curation. Buffy Hamilton and Jarrett Krosoczka, author of The Lunch Lady graphic novel series finished up the day! How amazing!

Reflections coming soon!