Lego walls are awesome!

I'll admit that I still love Lego. The obsession really rekindled itself when I started dating my husband. As two broke kids barely scraping by, we would often waste time by walking around malls, downtown, and specifically Toys R Us. We both have fond memories of the chain toy empire. Countless times, we would spend hours walking around, reminiscing about Christmases and birthdays past, getting to see each other through our truly child-like personalities.

Fast forward to today, where I'm obsessed with The Lego Movie, bought my husband a mini version of Han Solo's aircraft for his birthday, and we STILL go to Toys R Us. The conversations have shifted from "If I was little, I'd love this" to "when our kids are big enough for dolls, they are NOT getting Monster High dolls. Ew."

At our school, we are trying to create a makerspace inside our Lower School Learning Commons, or as I'll refer to it from now on as LSLC. If you're unfamiliar with the term "makerspace", I'd recommend doing a quick Google search or checking out the article Manufacturing Makerspaces from American Libraries Magazine. The article delves into the ideas of makerspaces, how they can function, and all kinds of cool gadgets and gizmos for your sweet, sweet makerspace setup.

Our space here is a little limited and we are trying to make sure the things we start to include in the LSLC are moveable. This way, we can adjust the space to cater to the students' needs, as well as needs for faculty and staff.

Our head librarian sent me a link to an AWESOME blog written by Diana Rendina. She seems like a super creative lady, so props to her for being able to think of and complete something this awesome in her library. In this particular blog entry, she glues a bunch of Lego boards to her wall to create a makerspace.
 
I LOVE THIS IDEA.

Benny agrees with me.

What stood out to me about this blog article was when she said:

I would love to see every school build a LEGO wall – they’re so much fun.  My students love it, and it’s a great opportunity for them to exercise creativity, spatial thinking, fine motor skills, math, etc.  Plus, it’s just fun and stress relieving.

Toys have a purpose. They teach children to be creative and use their imagination, enhance their fine motor skills, use math or engineering, help them learn how to work together and compromise. Wow! It's incredible, these tricky adults sneaking educational stuff into toys. How clever.

I think it's wonderful that a toy as simple as Lego can help children develop in so many different ways. Playing is an essential and important part of childhood, and for the past several years, I've seen many parents over schedule their kids to the point where they don't want to play simply because they are so gosh-darned tired.

This would be a great step for our LSLC to go as far as a makerspace, with a few caveats. My reasons being are:

1. It's affordable. 3-D printers, while all the rage and super cool, are not practical yet. If we go with our alternative plan of taking this table with various Lego plates similar to these, we could probably create a Lego table for about $20. That doesn't include the glue/caulk, but that would not be that big of an investment.

2. It's great for all ages! Who doesn't like playing with colorful bricks and letting your imagination go wild? (Hint: I still really do, thankyouverymuch). Duplo bricks fit perfectly on plates that are made for standard bricks. Families could come and enjoy it after school, too.

3. Our idea for Lego tables would help keep our space multi-purpose. As much as I love the idea for a Lego wall, our space gets used frequently by tons of different groups. It would be great to be able to store our Lego supplies in our work room so that no little yellow dudes get left behind or thrown into an air vent, never to be seen again.

Hopefully you will be seeing pictures of a fabulously crafted freestanding Lego station, where kids are creating cities, monsters, spaceships, or even recreating scenes from Ninjago. This would definitely be one more step in a positive direction for not only the physical space of our library and the LSLC but also our library program.

Not Everything's Archie

Most librarians probably would not find their first "official" book order super exciting, but this library assistant sure does! I placed my first order for our "little gn" section of graphic novels for lower and middle schoolers. It was way more difficult than I anticipated. The first year I was here, I helped the lower school librarian a lot with her book orders. This time? It's all me!

I couldn't be more excited!

This is a genre I'm super passionate about. I started reading comics and the like when I could barely read. My brother would share his Life with Betty and Betty's Diary comics with me.

 

This one is a national treasure, I'm sure.

Though probably advanced as far as writing and subject matter, I was hooked. "Archies" are still my favorite comics, as trite and tired as some may be. Yes, Dan DeCarlo, we can tell that you whited-out some 70's band and hand wrote "*NSYNC" as a band Veronica needed her groovy autograph book for. You are fooling no one.

 Even then, my love of books and comics grew. I hate to admit how big of a consumer I was as a child, but it was the late 80s and early 90s and that is what we were raised to be. My parents, however, pushed me to make as much as consume, so more often than not I would act out or write stories based on the things I already loved.

Anime was becoming increasingly popular in my middle school years, probably due to the mass amounts of people that now had cable. It wasn't a taboo like it had been, where people were going to conventions to buy subtitled or fan dubbed VHS tapes of Ghost in the Shell or Fushigi Yugi. No, there were famous voice actors, professional subs supplied by local company FUNimation, and more fans than ever. I started watching Toonami after TRL every day after school (dating myself much?), and was absolutely in love with this wacky, beautiful Japanese world. My favorite show was Gundam Wing and I bought manga and feature length films at my very first A-Kon that changed my life forever.

How could you not fall in love with these sci-fi soldiers? One of them is even a test tube baby!

I became obsessed--literally. I spent times when friends were sleeping at slumber parties reading through the entire Mars manga series, reading all the countless Mobile Suite Gundam offshoots, as well as discovering new favorites in Nausicaa and Kare Kano (His and Her Circumstances). My heart was full.

Super heroes had always been a love of mine as well, but anime took the front seat for a long while. Once I graduated high school, however, the world of the graphic novel, including super heroes, had changed immensely. 

I have been in love ever since.

Continuations of favorite movies or TV shows, beautiful allegories for family relationships, whatever it may be, I loved it. This beautiful medium can transport the reader to their world of choice with friends of choice. You get to peek on characters you might never meet in this life or galaxy.

There comes those goose bumps again, dangit.

With my history of loving graphic novels, I am so thrilled and honored to be ordering literature that can and will shape a child's view in some way. It's crazy to think that every thing I potentially do impacts a student in some way or another. It's incredibly humbling. 

This order, I specifically searched for a lot of pro-girl graphic novels. Even in today's state, it's incredibly difficult to find age-appropriate books that have a strong female protagonist that is not a princess or anything silly like that. I found some great titles in that vein, as well as some that are perfectly gender neutral. I've told some of my manga loving girls that I've got some fun things coming their way and they get so excited! Some are so adorably excited I cannot wait to share these books with them.

Speaking of the books, I made a little collage of some of them! Some are re-orders or extra copies (one can never have too many Amulet books!) so I've omitted some of my order. Here's the visual of a glimpse of what we're getting:

 

Look at all those potential friends and memories to be made! I can't wait to read Li'l Gotham and Monster Turkey/Monster Christmas. 

Happy Reading!

Christine

Fiction Sorting and Alphabetizing

We are back to square one in Libraryland as we are every year when it comes to teaching the basics. A good refresher never hurt anybody! Carrie came up with the idea to have a game where kids sort books according to alphabetical order, but also to our cataloging system. I then took a really fun presentation from SmartExchange and changed it to fit our needs...and also my pickyness about colors.

Here's what our stations looked like the first time we had the students play the game:

It worked well! The tables were a bit tricky because the students then had to maneuver bookends. We decided to put them on carts instead, that way we could wheel the game wherever we needed to suite the schedule for the Lower School Learning Commons. This worked out perfectly because it gave students an easier way to prop up the books while sorting them and also divided our three fiction sections with three shelves.

I was fortunate enough to help teach this lesson this past Friday. We were crazy booked in the library, so I proctored the game in Carrie's office. The kids still had fun, refreshed their memory, and I got to teach. Those are three pretty great things to end a crazy week on!

They did get a bit loud, but I only assume it was because they were so excited! I encouraged them to really work together as we had seen some previous groups take advantage of working in a group. I was pleasantly surprised by their helping each other without much disagreement about what goes where.

In case you are interested, here is where I found the SmartBoard lesson that I updated. It had already been adapted by somebody else, but I tweaked it even further. I prefer to use cleaner fonts like Verdana or Calibri for my lessons as they are less distracting and easier for most kids to read. It also helps me create the slide to look more like a non-fiction text, with different types of text using different fonts or colors.

If you are interested in checking out the slide that I did, leave a comment and I can e-mail it to you! :)

Graphic novels-woo hoo!

I am so excited to be ordering graphic novels for the library. I've probably mentioned it in every post that I've written lately, but hey, I'm easily excitable. SO excitable, in fact, that I have created a Tumblr just for my graphic novel reviews and to help me keep track of them.

This will keep me on pace here with writing about what's going on in the library, as well as other new books. I can promise that I will be trying harder to update more frequently. That's a mini goal of mine, I guess. Keeping on top of my stuff.

The URL for my tumblr is: http://littlegn.tumblr.com