BHL Bookworm

What is the Georgia Children's Book Award program?

2010-01-11T11:37:00.003-05:00

The Georgia Children's Book Awards are sponsored each year by the University of Georgia's Language and Literacy Education Department. A professor in the department puts together a committee of teachers and librarians who will look for their favorite books for children published within the last few years. They put together a list of 20 picture books and 20 chapter books. It's a lot of reading!

The lists are posted on the website for the awards program and at that point, students around the state of Georgia begin reading the books. If a student reads or listens to 3 of the books, he or she can vote in the spring for their favorite. The winners are announced at the end of the school year.

What's really exciting is that sometimes the winners actually come to Athens to pick up their awards and talk to teachers and librarians at the Georgia Children's Literature Conference. This is super-exciting - it's how I got to have dinner with Mo Willems, who wrote and illustrated Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. He really is hilarious.

The books on the list are also used for the Georgia Helen Ruffin Reading Bowl. Once the BHL team is finished with competition, the books on the list will be available to everybody once again to check out. Here's the link to this year's list: http://www.coe.uga.edu/gcba/pdf/09-10-bookaward-nominees.pdf.

"I heard the best book!"

2009-10-14T08:28:00.002-04:00

Remember when audiobooks were cassettes or reel-to-reel tapes? No, probably not.

Digital recording has come of age in the last few years, and books are available in a a number of different formats. You can purchase them on iTunes or Amazon, listen on an Amazon Kindle, or iPod, or iPhone. I'm currently listening to The Report of the 9/11 Commission.

Something we are trying in the media center is the Playaway format. It's a digital recording of a book that you wear on a lanyard around your neck and listen to with headphones or ear buds.

I think they're pretty cool because 1.) you don't need anything except the Playaway to listen to it. No tape player, MP3 player, or anything, just this little mini-book-looking thing you were around your neck. And 2.) I like it because it looks like you're wearing a mini-book around your neck. Probably not everybody's idea of a fashion statement, but I think it says, "I'm a smart, interesting person who likes books!"

We have 13 Playaways in the BHL media center, featuring such titles as Holes, Charlotte's Web, Bad Boy, and The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. Right now they happen to be all checked out. But when you're in the media center next time, stop by and see what's on the shelf.

Scholastic Book Fair Coming Soon

2009-09-11T13:22:00.004-04:00

Just a quick post to say I have seen some of the titles on the fall fair, and this is going to be REALLY good: The fourth Wimpy Kid book comes out the week of the fair, so we'll have paperback copies of it for $7; also Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins, the sequel to Hunger Games, new horror books like Thirteenth Child by Patricia Wrede and All the Lovely Bad Ones by Mary Downing Hahn; and Pride and Prejudice with Zombies. Zombies are really hot right now, sort of the new vampires, I guess you'd say. We have also asked for as many of Sharon Draper's books as we can get.

So - lots to look forward to next month. Book fair starts Friday, October 16.

The Changing Media Center, or Good-Bye to the Library Dragon

2009-08-26T08:59:00.002-04:00

Once upon a time, many school libraries were guarded by fierce dragons. Students who dared enter at all scurried in, clutching their library books to their chests, and approached the circulation desk with dread in their hearts. One "Shusssshhhhh!" from the dragon would leave a blazing scorch on their heads. Tossing their books quickly into the book drop, they fled into the shelves, all the while casting nervous glances toward the dragon behind the desk who was engaged in applying ugly orange tape to the spines of the books stacked in front of her.

Okay, I exaggerate slightly.

My first school librarian, Mrs. Lippman, in Columbus, Georgia, was no dragon. She made me feel welcome from my first visit to the school library as a first-grader. She read Dr. Seuss stories to our class and introduced me to the Grinch. What I loved best about going to the library was choosing my own book. There are not many choices first-graders get to make on their own, and the opportunity to select what I would soon be learning to read was always thrilling.

But I know from having attended other schools that not all librarians were as welcoming as Mrs. Lippman. Some guarded their collection like treasure, which I can understand to a point because I too think books are invaluable. However, the generation of librarians I belong to realizes the value of the books comes from what they mean to our students. If you have a perfectly maintained book collection but no check-outs, I don't think you have a library.

I hope students and teachers who enter the library at BHL feel wlecome. We have worked hard to update the collection and to actually get those books in students' hands. You can help by returning library books whenever you find a stray one. And I promise a large pizza to the first student who ever hears me "Shussshhh!"

Why I read

2009-08-11T07:05:00.000-04:00

I think one reason I read is because I can be kind of lazy. Now there's bad-lazy, like not doing anything, and there's smart-lazy. I think I fall into the smart-lazy category.

I found that reading helped me work smarter at school. So I had to do less work.

Here's how I think that worked: I liked to read stories. So I read a lot of them. That meant I did pretty well in reading class without having to work at it. In language arts class, I did well too. Why? Because reading all those stories made it easier for me to see without thinking too hard where the mistakes were in a sentence. I saw sentences in stories all the time that were well written. So I could tell what wasn't written correctly. It also helped me write my own sentences without as much effort as it would have taken if I'd not read all those books full of well written sentences.

I had to work a little harder in social studies. But it helped that I read because I saw history - which is a lot of what social studies is - as a kind of stories. A lot of stories, in fact. When I thought of it as stories, it was easier to learn.

This left me with more time to spend on the subjects I had to REALLY work at which were science and math. When I was a girl, those were the subjects people assumed boys were the best at, so maybe that's why I wasn't as quick in those classes. Fortunately that's changing now. But anyway, because I didn't have to spend as much time on the other subjects, I could work on my science and math to the point that I could, if I concentrated, get an A. Or a solid B, at least.

So that's how reading because I'm lazy ended up helping me in school after all.

Why do you read?

New for 2008-2009: Helen Ruffin Reading Bowl

2008-07-09T16:38:00.000-04:00

For the last few years elementary and middle schools in Clarke County have competed in Battle of the Books competitions at the school and county level. This year we are trying something new at the middle school level. For the first time students in middle school will have the opportunity to compete in the Helen Ruffin Reading Bowl. I'm sure there will be lots of questions about this new (new to us, at least) event, so here is my attempt to answer at least a few:

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

1. How is the Helen Ruffin Reading Bowl (HRRB) like Battle of the Books (BOB)?

Students form teams of 5, with one alternate. They have a book list to divide among them, and they answer questions from those books.

2. How is HRRB different from BOB?

There will be 20 books to read so everyone on the team has to commit to reading a minimum of 4. The questions are formatted differently. In BOB all questions are phrased, "In which book does ...?" and the team has to give the title and author of the book. Questions in HRRB are simply questions from the books: "Why was Mike called 'Macaroni Boy'?" So it's set up more like a trivia game. And you use buzzers to signal that you know the answer! Each school will hold a competition to determine which team will represent them at the district level. The top 2 teams from district will go to regional competition. There is also state level competition which takes place right here in Athens at the Children's Literature Conference in March. Also some school districts have competitions for high school students too.

3. What are the HRRB list?

They are the nominees for the Georgia Children's Book Awards, chapter books for middle schoolers, picture books for elementary. All students who read at least three of the books can vote in the spring for their favorite for the Georgia Children's Book Award. It's quite a big deal. The author comes to Athens and speaks at the Children's Literature Conference. Here's the link to the list: Georgia Children's Book Award nominees.

4. Why are middle schools doing HRRB instead of BOB?

We know that students have had a great time participating in BOB at the elementary level. We wanted to try something new and maybe a little more challenging. The book awards are done by the Department of Language and Literacy Education at UGA. Since that's a local program, we wanted to support them and their efforts to promote great books for students. And we liked the idea of students who wanted to being able to participate in high school. Plus, so many students asked if there was a BOB competition beyond the county level that we wanted to be able to send our county's top team on to regional. This way our top 2 teams can compete.

5. How do I sign up to participate in HRRB?

Recruit a team of five students and one alternate, and sign up in the media center anytime between August 18th and November 25th. The sooner, the better! Remember, the school competition will be earlier than BOB has usually been so start reading and get ready to compete.

Thoughts on a gingerbread library

2006-12-14T09:47:00.000-05:00

For the last few years my daughter and I have made gingerbread houses for Christmas. We aren't overly ambitious - we ALWAYS use a kit with prebaked, precooked gingerbread pieces, plus bags of candy and royal icing mix.

Last year after we finished the house, I took it to the media center and the kids oohed and aahed very appreciatively over it. And it occurred to me that next time I could create a gingerbread library. So I did. This time, I buit and decorated the gingerbread house. (Get a Wilton kit. They are dependable and easy to assemble. Plus their gumdrops are the best I've ever tasted.) I bought some little Christmas decorations - Santa, an angel, a gingerbread person, a reindeer - or maybe it was a moose, hard to tell. Then I found little pictures of books in vendor catalogs, laminated them onto construction paper so they could be folded as book covers, and the gingerbread library was ready for its unveiling.

Again the students were impressed. After three days I noticed though that I was continually answering the same three questions. So I posted the following notice:

Gingerbread Library Answers
1.) Yes, it's real - real gingerbread, candy, and icing.
2.) Yes, I made it (from a kit I got at Michael's which I highly recommend).
3.) No, you can't eat it. Well, theoretically you could - if eating something that 600 students and teachers have touched and breathed, sneezed, coughed, and drooled on does not destroy your appetite. Plus, you know those large insects out in the halls - what do you think they do when we're gone? Have you had life science yet? Microbes? Think about it and don't eat the gingerbread house. (See Hansel and Gretel).

A few hardy souls swear that even answer number 3 and the further information that mice have been nibbling on it will not deter them. And for all I know it might have been them and not the weight of several library mice that broke the back corner off pretty evenly. It doesn't bear thinking about.

Merry Christmas to all!