January and February have been spent doing what I love best: storytime! We finished up reading all of our North Carolina Children's Books Awards nominees! Each storytime is set around a theme and each has the same general format: we sing a welcome song, read the first book, sing a song incorporating movement that goes along with the theme of that storytime, and read a second book. I encourage all of the kids to sing and move with me as it encourages early literacy skills and provides a great brain break to get any of our wiggles out! At the end of our unit, all of the students voted for their favorite book! Our winner this year was Can I Be Your Dog? by Troy Cummings, followed by Misunderstood Shark by Ame Dyckman and We Don't Eat our Classmates by Ryan T. Higgins! My main imperative of storytime is that all of the students learn to LOVE reading and to love the library! It is my sincere hope that all of our students find their important place in the library and identify as readers!

Second grade has been working hard to become Library Ninjas! The lessons we've been focusing on during this unit teaches the students about the sections of the library, call numbers, and how to use the catalog to locate books on the shelves. The students have been working SO hard and doing a phenomenal job! A lot of these classes have potential for crazy: students walking all over the library space trying to locate certain call numbers and titles. I am so very proud to report that our second graders have risen to these challenges. They are so focused on their library lessons and are quickly becoming skilled users of the library! This is an important skill that they will use for the rest of their lives. Want to see how good they are? Ask your second grader what call number makes up the Graphic Novel section! 

What a busy couple of months it has been! Our third grade boys have started a once a week rotation for our lunchtime Boys' Book Club! I began this after noticing how tricky it can be for this particular population to find books that excite them. This is an in-between age where some of our kids feel anxious to graduate the picture book section but find the chapter books shelves full of material that they're not quite ready for. Our lunchtime book club is a place where they can listen to booktalks, share with each other what their favorite titles are, and explore the books I pull that are great for this age -range! So far, it's been a great success and the boys have been leaving with new checkouts that they're excited to read!

We've also been hosting as many Claxton classes as possible to experience our AR Sandbox landform centers made up of our AR Sandbox, VR headsets where students get to 'visit' landforms from around the world, and a Landform-Maker station where they create landforms with PlayDoh.

Our third grade New Monuments collaboration was a huge success again this year! Please visit our Workshops and Residencies page to learn more and see photos!

4th and 5th grades have been busy with Battle of the Books practices and reading! This year's EBOB group is an absolute delight to be with! I am so lucky to be working with this amazing assemblage of readers!  

Ms. Lotter has been bringing students down to the library for monthly booktalks and this has been a wonderful way to get kids turned on to new reading material! 

A group of students from Ms. Baggerly's class have been down to the makerspace to learn finger-knitting and it's been a joy to work with these students, creating and having fun! 

Finally, our 5th grade students have each received their own copy of Ghost by Jason Reynolds and we are getting so excited for his upcoming visit in March. The student and staff response to the writing of this newly-named National Ambassador for Young People's Literature (by the Library of Congress!) has been overwhelming and passionate! So grateful for an author who tells a true story that readers respond to with such enthusiasm!

K and 1

What a busy and fun month it has been: reading, celebrating Hour of Code, and looking forward to the upcoming winter break!

We read one of our North Carolina Children's Book Awards books called Potato Pants by Laurie Keller about a potato who loves to wear - you guessed it! - PANTS! After enjoying the book together, the students created their own map of Potato Town complete with potato pants stores! Then, to celebrate Hour of Code week, the students worked with Ozobots mini-robots and explored how they 'read' color codes to make their way around the student-made maps!

This month, our second graders finished up our mini-author and illustrator studies. As I'd said before, I loved this unit with the students as we read really amazing work and had such great class discussions. I just love how the students often have these observations and make connections about the work that I had never even considered before! To culminate our unit, we reviewed what we had learned about each author/illustrator and how their experiences influenced their work. Some of the classes got to take this one step farther and use a poetry-writing template from Teaching Tolerance to write our own poems of self-identity! 

We were lucky enough to host the AR Sandbox in the media center in December and second grade classes came through in a center-rotation that included landform building with PlayDoh and VR headsets to explore landforms around the world.

During the week before winter break, the specialist team hosted our second annual school-wide "Making the Holidays SPECIAL" in the decorated back classroom area of the Claxton library! We had so much fun singing, reading, playing instruments, and moving. Through it all, the students were working to earn pieces of a big snowman which, if completed, would earn their grade level a coveted Blue Specialist ticket - all blinged out with glitter for the holidays! All the classes left with a pack of hot cocoa, a candy cane and... drumroll please.... a Blue Specialist ticket!!

Kindergarten and First Grade Library storytime is always such a fun time of day for me! Sharing songs and stories with the occasional visit from a puppet friend is the best way to start a day.

After finishing our illustrator study of Christian Robinson we celebrated the idea of ourselves as AVID readers as we read by flashlight in a tent! We sang camp songs, read a book that glowed in the dark, and even pretended to make Smores over an ipad-campfire! That week, students were encouraged to read EVERYWHERE and ANYWHERE. It was a wonderful way to celebrate ourselves as readers, whether we're reading in the library or at home or in a tent!

After our library camping trip, we dove into a study of another amazing author/illustrator. For three weeks, our students read various works by Yuyi Morales. We 'met' the author via video to see how her experiences have influenced her work. Yuyi Morales is originally from Mexico and incorporates a lot of Spanish into her books. I learned Spanish from my seven years of living in Mexico and love to incorporate it into storytime. It was so much fun to read bilingual books together and we even sang some songs in Spanish as well. Yuyi Morales is one of my all-time favorites and I loved seeing the students getting to know her work as well. 

Now we are on to reading from the North Carolina Children's Book Awards nominee list. This is always a fun time of year where we enjoy these fabulous fiction and non-fiction titles. This allows us to read widely, enjoy varied activities with each book,  and even  vote for our favorite book at the end of the unit. We started our study  with Troy Cummings' Can I Be Your Dog? After reading, we got to work in the makerspace, creating our own paper bag dogs complete with collars and dog tags. Of course, since these dogs were 'born' in the library they love nothing more than being read to. Believe me, seeing the students reading to their dogs at check out time was one of the cutest things I've seen all year!

Second grade library time has been absolutely exhilarating for me as a teacher! Not only are we studying some of the most prolific, influential and amazing children's authors and illustrators of our time but the discussion surrounding the books has been truly thought-provoking and inspiring. 

After studying Jacqueline Woodson and Rafael Lopez, we went on to explore work by Monica Brown, Yuyi Morales, Matt De La Pena, Christian Robinson, Kwame Alexander, Kadir Nelson, and Vanessa Brantley-Newton. For each person we studied, we looked at their repertoire of work and  'met' each one via video to see how their experiences and identity have influenced their work. We saw how sometimes, their work overlaps as these great artists often end up working together and partnering to create amazing titles. 

I've collected some notes and observations from our conversations about each author/illustrator. We will use these to think about how our own experiences and identities can shape our own work  in December when we create I Am From poems, in line with Teaching Tolerance standards. This will be the first time I take our mini author / illustrator studies and really flesh it out to allow students the space to create their own work. I'm very much looking forward to seeing what the students create and have loved seeing their enthusiasm for the titles we have read together. For me, it is a success to have the kids clamoring to check out the titles being presented and I especially loved the day the poetry section of the library was decimated after our reading of the amazing poet Kwame Alexander! So grateful that these amazing second graders get just as excited about great books as I do!

What a fabulously busy fall we have had here at Claxton!

 One of the joys this year is the advent of what we hope will be a new tradition at Claxton: Libro Love! As part of the work the Social Justice League does here at Claxton, Ms. Eggett and I reached out to all of our families of Latinx heritage to see who might be interested in coming in to read books in Spanish and/or bilingual books to their child's class. We had an overwhelmingly positive response and were thrilled to host so many of our amazing Claxton families as they helped celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month and treated the classes with beautiful titles and a taste of their cultural identity.  Muchisimas gracias a todas las familias que participaron!

Our Thanks for Reading event this year was a big success! The Claxton library hosted Firestorm Books for the second year in a row for a phenomenal book fair.  It was great to see so many families get excited about the wonderful titles they found together.  Funds raised go towards building classroom libraries and also to bringing in new titles for our media center collection. Thanks to everyone who supported our Thanks For Reading Book Fair!

Claxton represented on November 21st as literature-lovers from all over Buncombe County gathered to enjoy literary trivia and help Isaac Dickson Elementary raise funds for an upcoming ACS author visit by Jason Reynolds! It was a fun evening for a wonderful cause. 

The 4th and 5th grade Battle of the Books team is up and running! This group of amazing readers meets every Friday morning to discuss the books we're reading and practice for the district competition that will be held at the end of March.  It is truly a joy to end my week with this group of incredible kids and, I'm glad to report,  the book list we're reading from this year has not disappointed!