Book Fair!

I survived my first book fair as well as the Donuts with Dads event we held this morning. It was way busy for awhile, but it was good. And now I want to sleep for a week.

I can't believe it's November already!

At the beginning of the month, I put together a quick little Thanksgiving-themed display. All of the books have to do with food (cook books or novels with food in the title or on the cover). I did not make the Turkey - my co-librarian made that in a previous year and saved it.


It's also Book Fair next week, so here is a sneak peek at some of the decorations. Our theme is "If I Only Had a Book," hence the Wizard of Oz decorations. I made the faces from a stencil template I downloaded and enlarged. I think they came out cute. And the ruby slipper is actually very sparkly although you can't see that in the picture very well.

My first author visit

Friday was my first author visit as a librarian. We had author Kathryn Erskine visit, and she presented to all three grade levels about how to be SASSY in their writing.

Snag your reader
Act your character
Show your story
Shake things up
You - put some of yourself in

She also ate lunch with our book club which was really nice of her. She answered questions as the kids ate.

A slow day

Today the library was closed all day to students because the library was being used for training, so we got a chance to work on getting ready for Teen Read Week next week. We have a lot going on, and it should be fun.


The theme of Teen Read Week this year is "Picture It @ your library," with a focus on how stories can be made visual, so today we put together a display of graphic novels, made everything we need for our book vs. movie voting contest (signs, posters, voting box, ballots), and put together the announcements to advertise the book vs. movie contest as well as the manga lunch with a librarian we're having on Wednesday next week (the Ashburn teen librarian is coming to talk to kids about manga during lunch). Then, next Friday is our big author visit with Kathryn Erskine! I'm excited about that and hope everything goes smoothly!

T.A. Barron

This past Wednesday, one of our local high schools was hosting the young adult fantasy author T.A. Barron. We had promoted the event to our students, so my co-librarian and I thought it would be good if one of us went in case any of our students showed up. I didn't see any there, but I did get a poster signed to display in our library:


Because I wasn't sure what sort of limit there was on number of items signed, Dad joined me there, and he got one of my personal books signed for me (the pages aren't that yellow in real life, that's just the lighting of the picture):

Authors, authors everywhere

This week we've been talking about planning an author visit for the school. We've got feelers out to a local-ish Virginia author and are waiting to hear back about her availability.

In the mean time, we've also put the wheels in motion for a special "virtual author visit" using Skype for our book club in April. It's pretty much set, we just need to order books and figure out how to make the technology work.

Busy, busy!

Work has been very busy, but I have been really enjoying it.

This week I made a Glogster to embed in our library main page instead of what we had before. It's a little busy, but still cute I think.

This week we will also finish up orientations, and then next week start teaching lessons!