#4 - Blogshare

  

BlogShare Post

Hello readers and storytellers! Today I will be posting about a blog share. I don’t know about you, but I did not even know what that term meant before. A blog share is when you share about another person’s blog that you find interesting! Today I am going to share about the Library Learners blog, hosted by Cari White. Here is the link to her blog home page https://librarylearners.com/.

I absolutely fell in love with this blog from the very first phrase under her logo, “making school libraries amazing, one library at a time!” As a future school librarian myself I find this to be just the kind of motivation and support I would need. This blog is also different from other blogs I have read because she has tons of guest writers. Guest writers will write a blog entry on a topic and Cari will post it on Library Learners. 

Now, the goal for this post was to find a blog was to share at least one entry topic from her blog. Well….I found so so many more than one entry, but I will keep it limited for my post here today.

The first entry I liked from Cari’s blog is titled Principals Book of the Month. Right from the title I was like, oh my goodness yes please! I would love to try something like this in my school library. Cari posts about how her  friend, Sara Romine, collaborates with her elementary school principal to make this book of the month happen. Cari even got Sara to write a guest post about it! Sara tells us about how to get the process started, the budget for the principal’s book of the month, delivery, making connections, and more. 

Sara and her new principal started this in 2020 during COVID. Sara says that the idea was to have “everyone to interact with the same text in a variety of ways to create a literacy community but also reinforce mindsets and habits we want to encourage.” They gave out a copy of the book to all of their classrooms and the principal would hop onto Zoom to showcase the book to those classrooms that were virtual at the time. Sara would send out a recording of the principal reading the book with extension activities included in the email. One of the coolest parts is that the teachers would take pictures of the activities and Sara could make a bulletin board of all the pictures. It is just so cool how the new principal got to interact with his/her students and it was all about reading and books! The link to this post is here, https://librarylearners.com/principals-book-of-the-month/. 

The second entry I liked is titled Library Video Game Tournaments. I know, I know, video games, WHAT?! But this is a very cool idea too. This time Cari had her friend Karina Quilantan guest post. Karina talks about esports and what a craze it is, and also about how she hosted a Super Smash Bros tournament in her library. I thought this would be a lot of fun to do in my future school library too. I wasn’t sure how it would go though. I  had many questions as I read the beginning, such as, do you get the word out like a notification at the end of each class, is it an after school club, what ages is the tournament for exactly. As I kept reading I saw Karina set up a game plan to help hold a tournament in your own school library too.

    Karina tells about which type of gaming system she used (and would be suggested to use), in this case a Nintendo Switch. She tells about how to get the word out to students and parents, how to set up the tournament (also using brackets like March Madness), and more helpful tips. I think this would be an encouraging and fun activity to try within a school library. It can get kids into the library, maybe not to specifically read the books, but they will need something to do while they wait for their turn to play. The link to this post is here, https://librarylearners.com/library-video-game-tournaments/.

 

Cari has a variety of different posts, including themed centers for different months, picture books for different months or holidays, helpful ideas, even a Follett book fair experience post. She even has makerspace posts! As you know I recently posed about makerspaces, so I find this very awesome! 

I have read through many of her posts and continue to enjoy each one. Cari also has a Facebook page called Library Learners. There are posts about things other librarians are doing or posting in/at their library, there are fun little questions that are asked for people to answer too. Here is the link to her Facebook page if you would like to check it out, https://www.facebook.com/LibraryLearners. 

Cari also has a “store” or page on teacherspayteachers.com. I promise this is not an ad, I just like to look at what some people have on teacherpayteachers and see if it would be something I personally am interested in and wanted to provide the information. Some of the things on her blog posts can be found on her store page, along with other categorized items she has for sale. 

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Readings for this week:

This week we had to read ghost stories and poems. I have to say that I had a really hard time finding ghost stories that were not a fantasy book about a ghost, then I remembered the Scary Stories books from when I was a kid. I read six different scary stories from the Scary Stories collections by Alvin Schwartz. The stories themselves were not super scary, but the pictures were super super creepy!  

Ghost Stories:

-The Bus Stop

-The Wolf Girl

-Rings on Her Fingers

-A Ghost in the Mirror

-The Viper

-The Wendigo

I had an easier time finding poems to read this week. I love Shel Silverstein, so I read some from his collection of poems, along with some other poems that I found. The Spider and The Fly retold by Tony DiTerlizzi is one of my recently discovered favorite poems. 

Poems:

-From Falling Up by Shel Silverstein:

* Falling Up

* The Deadly Eye

* People Zoo

* Haunted

* Crazy Dream

-From A Whiff of Pine, a Hunk of Skunk: A Forest of Poems by Deborah Ruddell

* Chipmunks Inc.

* A Tree Frog’s Lazy Afternoon

* Woodpecker Feud

* Biography of a Beaver

-The Spider and The Fly: Retold by Tony DiTerlizzi 

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Resources:

White, C. (2022). Library Leraners blog. Retrieved from https://librarylearners.com/.