It is hard to believe that spring has sprung, and that is true in the Riverdale Library too! We have several fun library activities to report out on since our last update!
CCBA Voting
The results are in and we have Riverdale Elementary’s winners for the nominated Colorado Childrens’ Book Awards for 2011! Nubs: The True Story of a Mutt, a Marine and a Miracle was by far the choice for best picture book! The Magician’s Elephant by Kate DiCamillo won for the junior novel category. The state-wide winners are: Nubs: The True Story of a Mutt, a Marine and a Miracle and Rick Riordan’s The Last Olympian for junior novel! Riverdale submitted 260 votes to contribute to the awards! Thanks to our students and teachers for reading these wonderful nominations for the year! This is a fun way to read some really great titles! And the books for next year’s Colorado Childrens’ Book Awards will be ordered soon!
Library Lover’s Month
February was Library Lovers’ Month and in the library we celebrated by growing a “heart tree” of the titles and authors we love! We collected 287 hearts for our tree, each listing the student or staff member’s name, title and author of the book! Some of our hearts from Ms. Younger’s students were even created using Tagxedo! Thanks for sharing your favorites with us!
Read Across America Day and Mystery Reader Week!
On March 2nd, we celebrated author, Dr. Seuss in the library! We hosted two very special guest readers, Mrs. Jeanne Clements, Mrs. Lott’s mother, and Mr. John O’Leary, also known as Riverdale’s very own “Papa!” Classes who visited the library for a guest reader on this day were: Ms. Younger’s Class, Mrs. Crouch’s Class, Ms. Piche’s Class, Mrs. H’s afternoon Class, and Mrs. Hestermann’s Class! Thanks for your participation!
Students who checked out books on this day were able to select a Dr. Suess goodie to take with them. (These prizes were purchased with PTO grant money. Thanks so much for the support of our WONDERFUL PTO parents!) We had a circulation of 275 items on March 2nd! This is about a 38% increase above our average daily check outs!
We also had fun guessing who our “Mystery Readers” were throughout the entire week! Thanks to: Ms. Erin Dolan, Mrs. Sarah White, Mrs. Christy Walp, and Mrs. Alice Parker who volunteered to read a sample of Dr. Seuss’ books to the students each morning! Three lucky students who guessed the Mystery Reader correctly were selected each day for fun Dr. Seuss prizes!
These winners were: Jeremy Thompson, Juliana Velasquez, Mason Ross, Alicia Gallegos, Briona Payan, Vanessa Graves, Chase Kascak, Kaycey Stephen, Alexus Patton, Gavon Vogt, Makenzie Lebsock, and Arden Howard! Thanks for participating!
Volunteer Thanks!
We offer a GIANT THANK YOU to our wonderful volunteers who help us with shelving library materials! These ladies are a great help to us~Felicia Losli, Kathy Henson, and Joann Fonseca. Thank you very much! We appreciate your help!
Notable Statistics
• Books checked out in February: 2981 (about 212 per day!)
• Books checked out from August-February: 20,472
• Classes and small groups served through librarian in Feb.: 54
• Percentage of those classes that involved technology: 43%
• Classes and small groups checking out with Miss Bonnie in February: 23 classes, 26 small groups
• Year to date students served in the library (not counting walk in traffic): 12,757! Wow!
Battle of the Books News!
As of our meeting on March 15th, the participating team members and sponsors have read a cumulative 14,246 pages in the 10 titles we are reading! As our season begins to come to a close, we will have our final school battle on April 13th at Riverdale during the school day. We will then send our winning team on to the District Battle on April 27th at Silver Creek Elementary in the evening. We will celebrate our accomplishments for ALL BOB participants with an ice cream party in May!
Collaborations with Librarian
Mrs. Lott recently worked with 14 first graders to extend their knowledge about plants. We had 3 different plant experiments in the library and created group Photo Stories to share with we learned about the scientific process with all first grade classes.
Second graders have recently created Glogs (online posters) for creative writing and showing what they learned in science. Look for a link to their work on the library website in Google soon…
Fifth graders also recently came to the library to review information literacy skills associated with features on non-fiction texts. We had a great time doing a group jigsaw to teach each other all of the different features!
Looking ahead…
We are looking forward to a busy last couple months of school with research and projects. Mrs. Lott and Mrs. G will be guiding an evening activity during PTO’s Turn Off the TV week. Hope to see you at the school on Wednesday the 20th of April!
Thanks for taking time to read this blog post!
