New School Year

Well, another new school year and as usual there are many changes. Same principal... That's good. It sure makes things tough when you get a new principal and we have had lots of them. We added PreK to our campus and 5th Grade. So now we have PK - 5. Other changes include dealing with departmental classes in 5th grade and Team Teaching classes in 3rd and 4th. It seems each grade level has their own idea how to fit my library into their system. Fifth grade students come every other Thursday and they take up my whole day. Fourth grade decided to bring their classes with the teacher who is teaching reading. They come every week, one week for check out and one week for Library lessons. Third grade is team teaching too but each teacher brings her own homeroom class.

Another change that made me a little sad is that the fire department decided I had too many stuffed animals in the library and I had to remove some. I've always gotten compliments about how wonderful my library was and how child-friendly it was. It was a little tough removing things that had made so many love my library but, you have to do what you have to do. It still has lots of stuffed animals...just not as many as before. I'm sort of an over the top type person so maybe it still looks okay. I'll post pictures later.

At school we have teams. I am teamed with the ESL teacher, the dyslexia teacher, and the Math/Science specialist. We are called the Intervention Team. I have sort of shortened it to the I-Team. It is much easier to type every time you need to identify the team. Last year we were a team of five, this year, we are a team of four due to all the government cutbacks. Those changes were really tough because we lost people that were awesome teachers. Then because of the changes throughout the district, two of our team members are new. I like the new team members a lot but I do still miss the ones who left.

Adding new grade levels means adding new books to target those new audiences. They gave us some new money to buy books for 5th grade but not PreK. We also closed down two intermediate campuses and split up those books between all the elementary campuses and the Junior High. They didn't give us new bookcases to put them in so I had to find them throughout the building. They don't match exactly but they don't look too bad. I did some heavy weeding.