Fancy seeing you here!

Whew! I don't know about you, but there has been quite a lot happening around here lately.

A quick run down of the last five years of blogging silence:

1. I finished up my Master of Library Science in May 2016.
2. I finished two years as a school librarian in Houston.
3. I then moved to Kuwait to be a school librarian (I'm still here after three years!).
4. I met the most incredible man who exceeded all my expectations for a life partner.
5. I married that same man! (Cue: Wedding March)
6. This interesting little sickness started spreading around the world...

So, quite a bit has happened! Those are just the highlights.

The library that I now run is for Early Childhood all the way through grade 12. It's absolutely tiny. If the entire space was used for just elementary it would still be considered tiny. I'm rather certain that mine is the smallest private academy library in the country. But I don't mind! I actually love that I get to see students across all ages! It gives me a chance to get to know their faces, some of their names (I can only hold on to so many!), and hopefully impact a fraction of those I come across. I really do love being a librarian.

One of my favorite accomplishments in this tiny library of mine has been the genrefication (I'm going to pretend that's a real word) of the middle and high school fiction books. Too often students would come to me asking for scary books, books like Harry Potter, etc., but it's difficult to know what they're looking for off hand. Some I can do easily! But not all. So my solution (which I also did in my Houston library) was to rearrange all of the novels by genre. So now I have 8 sections: realistic, humor, scary, mystery, historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and adventure! It really helps the students to focus in on one area of interest, instead of roaming all of the shelves not knowing what they're looking for at all!

I've done a few different reading competitions over the last three years in this library.
Year 1: "How Far Will You Read?"
Students kept a log of how many pages they read each week, and each page was "one mile". Every month, we'd tell the students how far their class had read from Kuwait. By the end of the school year, we had a couple of classes that had read enough pages to circumvent the globe twice!! It was a lot of fun!

Year 2: Journals!
Our school had a plethora of leftover notebooks from the year before. We begged them from admin, and we gave each student one to keep in her library folder. We gave grades 3 & 4 the following questions:

Grade 3 was required to answer three of the questions, and grade 4 was required to answer 4 (in complete sentences, of course!).
Grades 1 and 2 were significantly simpler. All they had to do was draw a picture of something in the book, and write the sentence "I did (not) like this book", and grade 2 had to tell me why (It was boring. It was funny.).

Year 3: Always be kind!
The first rule in all of my classrooms and libraries has always been the same: ALWAYS BE KIND! So, this year, we did the exact same thing as last year, but instead of providing the journals (the school didn't have any this school year) the girls bought their own. Grades 2-4 also had to include one sentence about kindness. It could have been something simple like, "Barbie was kind." Or they could have elaborated: Junie B. Jones was not kind because she yelled at Ricardo.

For the winners, we gave them prizes! We had prizes for the class that read the most/wrote the most journal entries in each grade level, the girl who read/wrote the most in each class, the girl who read/wrote the most in each grade level, the top class overall the grade levels, and the top girl over all grade levels. The prizes ranged from certificates, free book bags that we got from Scholastic, dum dum suckers, little journals and sparkly pens that I found at a stationary store around here, and each year, I ask my school to fund 20KD to the girl who reads the most out of the whole school (and 10KD for the girl who reads the most in her grade level). But the best prize is...

...THE FIELD TRIP!!! We take the winners to a bookstore near the school to shop for books (or other little knick knack things that they can afford...books are very expensive here!), we have lunch together, and then we spend some time playing on the playground near the restaurant. It's so much fun!! We normally take the overall class that wins, but this year's participation was pitiful! I don't know why the girls had so little motivation, but they did! So this year we decided that we'd only take the top 15-20 readers in the school, not necessarily an entire class. But then...

...the world shut down. We had been on vacation during the last week of February for the National Day holiday. That's when the first case was reported. And because everyone travels during holidays (Kuwait is tiiiiiiiny, y'all), they decided to be prudent and close the schools for another two weeks after that. And then another two weeks after that...and then for a month after that, and then an indefinite closure with an assumption that we'd go back in August for the new school year. So, no field trip this year.

I still have the gifts that I bought for the winners, so I hope to give them to them when we return in a few months.

For the next school year, I've been trying to figure out what to do for the reading competition. And I think I've got it! As the girls read through their books, they have to write down words that they don't know. Then, when they get to the library on their library day, we'll spend some time finding definitions to those words which they will then have to record in their notebooks (this is still only grades 2-4). Grade 1 will continue with their pictures and "I did (not) like this book." That is about the extent of their skill level right now.

Anyway, I think I've updated my librarian life pretty thoroughly for the moment. And since we're currently on 22 hour lockdown (we have two hours of outside time a day...woooo!!), I'll have plenty of time to continue later.