Summer's here!

I've had a great first year as a teacher librarian, so I can't say that I'm thrilled to see it come to an end.  Plus, it means I won't see my son who just graduated in the comfy seats at the high school library anymore.  :(  But, I am excited that some big projects we've had on the drawing board will be coming to fruition.  I can't wait for the kids to come back in the fall!

So here's some things I'm working on:

At the elementary, a third kindergarten class is being added.  To make room, the second grade teachers are giving up an extra room that they shared to do small group instruction and such (and boy did they need it!  Their rooms are awfully small).  So they're going to use the "book room," a space at the end of their hallway that is full of - you guessed it - books (for when the classes used to do Guided Reading groups).  What better place for all those books than the library?  We have a storage room that is full of empty boxes (to move books, see below) and televisions that rarely get used and books that didn't transfer to our new LIS last year and some crazy old stuff.  So even though I didn't know this was going to be on the top of my to-do list a week ago, here it is!  The new kindergarten teacher can't get into her room until the second grade teachers are out of that room, and they can't get out until the book room is emptied, so that's the first thing to do.

Well, and before that happens, we have to move some bookshelves into the storage room.  I could just take the shelves the books are on now, but I have two extra shelves I was going to have to put into storage anyway so they'll go in there.  But to do that, we have to move books off of those and then move these mammoth shelves (12 feet long, one piece) into the storage room.  Whew!

Then we'll be building seating (something like this).

Then we'll be building a three-tier stage (here's my original inspiration).

But first we'll be painting.

And before that we'll be shopping.  Paint, rollers, tape, etc.  Plus lighting.  I'll go look at fixtures tomorrow.

That doesn't even go into doing a complete inventory of the books, creating lists for them by Lexile, making some new collections, like picture books for older readers, and books for beginning readers.

Then there's the high school!  Can you say library cafe?

Pictures soon!  But here's a reminder of how far we've come: