Category: general

Reflective Autumn

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On a whim I decided to try Wikiquote to see what it had to say about April (no good, all northern hemispherical) and then hit gold with a seach on ‘autumn’:

“If winter is slumber and spring is birth, and summer is life, then autumn rounds out to be reflection. It’s a time of year when the leaves are down and the harvest is in and the perennials are gone. Mother Earth just closed up the drapes on another year and it’s time to reflect on what’s come before.”

Mitchell Burgess, Northern Exposure, Thanksgiving, 1992

(http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Autumn)

Reflective is exactly the right word – I had a lot of time out in the backyard this weekend (7 loads of washing hung out and brought back in again) and I found myself contemplating the bright daffodil-yellow scattered amongst the emerald leaves of the apricot tree, and watching cloud shapes against a blue blue sky, listening to the sounds of early season AFL games from the oval at the end of my street, and watching my dogs. I have been thinking about what to post on this blog, because so much has been happening that I don’t know quite where to start.

Most recently we had three days of training on how to use our new Library Management System, which basically consisted of the trainer going through all twelve modules of the software, one by one, showing us how to navigate, where to find common functions, how to do what we need to do. If I had not had my laptop there with the software already installed I would have gone completely bonkers by the end of the second day! The trainer was very nice and knowledgeable, and apologised for the lecture-format, but given the time available (she is based in Perth, so popping back over for a follow-up is not an option) we had to get through as much as possible as quickly as possible. I had post-it notes, pens, a Word doc and the new software up and running, and spent my time tagging useful parts of the training manuals with post-its, writing up procedures in my Word doc, and copying the trainer’s actions in the new software so that I could practice doing it for myself. I even took screenshots and added them to the right spots in my notes doc!

What relevance does this have? Well, it is a huge reminder to me that being made to sit passively while someone else transmits the information is stultifyingly boring!!!! This may explain why I have always made copious notes, frequently with multiple colours – and occasionally illustrated – throughout my high school and university studies. I have to do something to experience the learning, and I have no doubt at all that the young boys in my classes feel exactly the same way.

Actually I find it kind of amusing that despite being an avid reader, academically successful in the traditional school model, and now a Teacher Librarian (surely the most stereotyped as a print-bound teacher?) I do not like to learn things by reading them! At a bare minimum I talk things through, but to really feel sure that I have learnt something I like to practice or perform it. I am trying to embrace this in my teaching – I want to know what it is like to use various tools in my classes, and just reading about the uses of Flip video cameras or wikis isn’t enough – I am trying them out to see what happens. This can make planning, assessment and classroom management a little tricky sometimes… but the students seem to enjoy trying these new things out, and I am certainly learning new things!

Getting back into the swing of things

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2010 is here, and tomorrow we welcome the students back to school. We staff had a Professional Development week last week, full of meetings, policy updates, planning sessions, first aid training, excellent food, and lots of slightly befuddled expressions as people tried to remember where they put those books/files/illicit chocolate supplies last year.
For me there were some valuable discussions about technology directions, ways to coordinate library classes so as to support classroom projects, and lots of colleagues dropping in to grab boxes of resources as they set up their classrooms.
This year will see some more tweaking of library classes; Year 5 and 6 classes will again be a team-taught, integrated approach, Year 3 are looking for research skills lessons to support a class unit, and Year 2 will be coming to the Big Library for a full 50 minute lesson, so as to give them a better start on book and information skills. To give me the time to do that, Kinder library will be taken by the JS head, so I will put together a “Beginner’s Guide to Teaching Library for Littlies” to support that. The Deputy head will also be taking Preps for 25 minutes, mostly for sharing stories, while I do a separate information skills lesson – this will be an interesting arrangement, needing some coordination to keep things relevant.
I see some big benefits in these arrangements for spreading the understanding of what library time can add to children’s education.
* Firstly, everyone knows how very busy the head and deputy head are, so having them teach library lessons may increase the perceived value beyond that of relief time for classroom teachers.
* Secondly it will provide more opportunities for collaboration between executive and I, and hopefully class teachers too, around the topic of information skills.
* Thirdly I hope that through reading with the small ones every week, these teachers will recognise the importance of helping children discover the riches to be found in reading for pleasure, so that this valuable facet of education is not neglected in favour of more assessable skills. Boys often struggle to see the point of reading, but my hope is that those who have warm memories of sharing great stories as children will rediscover reading later on, even if they get a little distracted (eg by adolescence) along the way.
Right now I have a certain amount of planning to do, so enough of the chitchat.

What’s the point of author visits?

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Now that I’m in recovery mode, and have had a chance to refine my event planner checklist, I’ve been thinking about the benefit of these author visits – how would I justify them to the powers that be if my budget came under fierce scrutiny?

I have hosted three author visits this year, two of them purely serendipitous. The visit last term by Jeannette Rowe gave our prep boys a chance to hear about how books are made, to see someone drawing pictures in the familiar style of known books, to understand some of the motivation behind writing books, and to enjoy well-known stories in a new way.
The book tour visit by Andy Griffiths gave students new insight into how funny books can be, how such outrageous ideas are developed, and how text and pictures interact. The drama performance of a short excerpt from the latest book also demonstrated how readers can interact with a text to bring it to life in a new form.
And this week’s event brought together sport and reading – a great AFL player up there on stage talking about how his old school friend asked him to help write a book, and now there are seven in the series with number eight planned for next year. Although many audience questions concentrated on Gary’s sporting career, there were quite a few about the series, how long it takes to write the books, things like that.

What are the students getting out of these events? For me it means a lot of organising – crossing ‘i’s and dotting ‘t’s – such as coordinating changes to timetables, supervision, ordering more copies of the books…

But for my students – the ongoing interest in the books, the discussions about the event and what they enjoyed, the connections they make between books on the shelf and the creative efforts of the person who put the story onto the page – those are very powerful things.

That’s the point.

Thank Goodness That’s Over!!

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I have been a little preoccupied this week, because today we were hosting another book launch-ish event, and anything that wasn’t arranged before I went to Perth had to be organised in a searing hurry – audio, permission notes, MCs, book orders, etc etc… Add to all that some fairly busy teaching days, staff meetings, Web 2.0 courses and normal home commitments, and you get a TL with not a lot of spare brain room for idle bloggery.
However, I am pleased to say that our event today went off without any particular hitches – thanks to the enormous help of various staff members and the students in their classes, we had chairs, audio, and MCs, adoring fans had their books signed, more adoring fans had their photos taken with the authors, and I earned some serious brownie points for being the organiser. The students had a great time, the authors were really wonderful speakers, various books and posters were given away as trivia quiz prizes, the school got one of those really really big posters with a nice thank you signed on it – and we only disrupted two lessons and recess. I’d say that’s pretty spectacular, wouldn’t you?

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