Colchester Elementary School Library Annual Report. Developed by Maureen Schlosser School Librarian May, 2014

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1 Colchester Elementary School Library Annual Report Developed by Maureen Schlosser School Librarian May, 2014

2 Table of Contents Highlights... 3 Student Learning Objectives... 5 Professional Activities... 6 Donations... 8 Volunteers... 8 Trends in Curriculum... 9 Collection... 9 Circulation Technology Databases Goals... 11

3 Highlights Collaborated with grade level teachers and specialists to offer opportunities for students to learn through the arts Added Discovery Education and BrainPop Jr. to our collection of online resources Added Apple T.V. and a big screen monitor in the Library Media Center for students to share their digital presentations Created an Internet Café for teachers to explore Web 2.0 tools Facilitated Read Across America activities with storyteller Len Cabral and a picture book, Snowflakes Fall, by Patricia MacLachlan and Steven Kellogg, for every classroom. Facilitated a small, first grade social networking group who reviewed library books Facilitated a small, second grade digital storytelling group who developed stories about our library program and presented them to the Board of Education

4 Held story time visits with the Head Start program Welcomed incoming kindergarten students to school with monthly story hours with Mrs. Etra, the music teacher. Partnership with Cragin Public Library and the Summer Reading Program yielded 162 children who participated in the program Developed a LibGuide library website to open access to our library 24 hours a day, with 9,300 views so far this year Mentored a Library Media student from Southern Connecticut State University Welcomed volunteers from the high school and the community Published article in Library Media Connection

5 Student Learning Objectives This year, second grade students worked on demonstrating proficiency in following the Stripling Model of Inquiry and evaluating information by checking the copyright date as well as the author for both print and nonprint resources. Data Gathering Process: Students were assessed in the beginning of the year, the middle of the year, and at the end of the year. All assessments asked the following questions: What would you like to learn about? What do you already know about your topic? What do you wonder about your topic? Where will you go to find the answers to your questions? How do you know you have good information to answer your question? The pre-assessment test given at the beginning of the year revealed that 19% of the children asked questions that would lead to research and 0% of the children were able to explain how to find out if the information was good information. The mid-year review revealed that 87% of the children asked good questions, and 7 students were able to explain how they knew they found good information. The final assessment at the end of the year revealed that 92% of the children asked investigative questions that would lead to research, and 41% of the students were able to explain how they knew they had good information. Next Steps: Because we were so successful with exceeding our goals this year, the librarians are going to develop a continuum for grades K-5 so that students can build on what they are learning about evaluating information and asking questions that will lead to research.

6 Professional Activities Professional Development Both Barbara Johnson and I earned a M.Ed. in School Library and Information Technologies this school year from Mansfield University. Barbara Johnson was asked by Governor Malloy s office to work on the Common Core Task Force. Together, with Assistant Principal, Mrs. Amity Goss, Second Grade Teacher, Rebecca Granatini, and Music Teacher, Roslyn Etra, presented at the AASL National Conference in Hartford. We also presented at the CECA Conference about working collaboratively to integrate the arts in the Library Media Program. We presented at regional professional development sessions, and offered sessions in our newly created Internet Café. Sample of classes offered in the Internet Cafe: Collaboration: Google Docs Formative Assessments: Google Forms, Padlet Presentation: Haiku Deck Online Resources: TeachingBooks.net, Discovery Education, Destiny Online Catalog Management Tools: Managing Student Engagement: Virtual Field Trips Barbara Johnson and I purchased gently used, comfortable chairs and tables for the Internet Café, and Barbara moved 6 laptops and a wireless printer into the lab from the main part of the library. Picture of an Internet Café session:

7 . Flyer introducing the Internet Café Haiku Decks created by second grade teacher after an Internet Café session: Because the attendance has been low for the Internet Café sessions, I will send out a Google Form asking teachers what they would like from the Internet Café sessions and what time of day they would most likely attend a session. The teachers that have attended the sessions have used what they have learned to communicate with parents and formatively assess student work.

8 Donations With donations from the PTO, Stop & Shop Rewards Program, an anonymous donor, the Birthday Book Club, Alpha Delta Kappa, and Mrs. Amy Hurt, we were able to add exciting titles to engage our children in reading for fun! I chose only high interest books for our children, buying books that they are always asking to borrow. Our top ten books continue to be the books that were purchased with these generous donations. Please take a look at our Birthday Book videos: Volunteers We have 2 volunteers that come faithfully every Wednesday and Thursday to read to the children and assist them in finding books or helping them on the computer. With their help, we have been able to take on more cumbersome projects because their assistance is so beneficial- We are thankful for the volunteers who ran the Scholastic Book Fair and added books to our library collection. Mrs. Amy Hurt was honored as Volunteer of the Year by the Connecticut Association of Schools for the tremendous amount of time she has spent making our collection more usable to our young readers and donating high interest books to our collection. Her donations are always on our top 10 list!

9 Trends in Curriculum Our teachers have participated in extensive professional development sessions to develop and strengthen the writing skills of our children. Because of this instruction, teachers and children are asking for books they are learning about in class. This writing development has also prompted teachers to work collaboratively with me to demonstrate and facilitate writing projects with library resources. One example was the work I did with Mrs. Record s class. The object of her lesson was to have students determine what makes a good introduction in writing. Her class searched through our library books to find their own examples of books that have interesting introductions. After the children read the first few sentences of many books, they shared with the class the book that hooked them because they loved the introduction. With many examples to work with, children were able to create their own interesting introductions with their writing. Collection Our collection was last analyzed in April of The results of the analyses indicated that we have books per student, and that the average age of the collection is Since the year 2000, Pluto was designated as a dwarf planet, and the Food Pyramid was replaced with a food plate. The news has changed over the past 14 years with new technologies, world politics, science discoveries, and social issues. Next Steps: Next year, I will begin weeding the collection, looking at circulation records and the age of the books, to make sure children have access to the most accurate information in our library. MARC Records- This year, I have added chapters to the MARC Records to all new nonfiction books to increase access to information. I decided to add the chapters in with the MARC records when one first grade teacher asked about a certain topic that resulted no hits on our catalog. As it turns out, a child from another class found

10 the topic in a chapter of a book just by chance and shared it with the teacher. The MARC Records did not pick this title up because the Table of Contents were not added to the MARC Records. With my new system of ensuring every book has the most searchable MARC Records, children and teachers will be finding books in our library we didn t know we had before. Circulation As of May 28, 2014, our library circulated 16,170 books. The most popular books are the Bad Kitty books, the Barbie books, the Lego books, the Pokemon books, the Star Wars books, the Transformer books, and books by Kate DiCamillo and Mo Willems. It is interesting to note that the most popular books are the series chapter books. Only two of our picture books made it to the top 50. Next Steps: Replace worn chapter books Continue to seek new books in series Market the picture book section so that they circulate more next year. Technology 13 laptops 24 computers 2 large screen monitors 1 apple t.v. 6 ipads

11 Databases We added two new databases to our list of child friendly databases for our young readers; Discovery Education and Brainpop Jr. Our latest usage report for the month of April indicated that our old standbys, PebbleGo (964 hits) World Book Online (16,740 hits), and TumbleBooks (390 hits) are used extensively. The numbers for BrainPop Jr. (95 hits) and Discovery Education (0) are low, which tells me I need to get the word out to teachers and children about these valuable databases. Goals One of my goals for next year will be to focus on cleaning up the chapter books and adding new series to the collection. Since the children frequently borrow the series chapter books, many are worn and are in need of replacing. I also plan to order more copies of the most popular titles, and continue to search for newly published series books that may be of interest to our young readers. My other goal for next year will be to update the collection, weeding out older books that may have wrong information, replace them with books with new information, and weed the books that have not been circulated.