Month: July 2016

Your Librarian Can…

- librariantiff 15 Comments

Let me start by saying how much I love and adore my network of educators!

I’ve started feeling a little nervous about the upcoming school year. I always do, but this year is different as I’ll be in a new school for the first time in a long time. There’s a new faculty for me to get to know and build relationships with and I want to start things off by setting a positive tone. Thinking a lot about how I want to introduce myself as the new librarian so the teachers will really get me and what all I’m about, I reached out to my PLN for some help.

I posed these questions of Facebook so I could tap into the great minds of both the awesome tribe of librarians that I belong to and to my awesome teacher friends, especially those who have taught with me serving as their librarian. Here’s what I asked on Facebook —

Teachers (especially those that have worked with me): What are the most helpful and meaningful things that a school librarian can do to support you?

Librarians: What would you want teachers new to working with you to know that you can do to support them?

The response was overwhelming and incredible. I got intense, thoughtful responses from teachers and librarians that helped me create this list and fun graphic:

YourLibrarianCan

I sorted and tallied responses to ultimately refine and combine ideas into this list. It will be very exciting to use this graphic to introduce myself and what I can do for my new teachers. What’s even more exciting is that I get to share this graphic with my awesome PLN! Please feel free to use and share this in any way that you see fit. Even if you are in a school where you have established relationships, it’s always great to start off the new school year reminding your teachers the many ways that you are a resource to them.

If you’re interested in downloading the high resolution file of this image, you can download it from Flickr. I hope this can be something for you to take back to school and use to kick off an awesome school year!

Chalkboard Paint Circ Desk & Word Cloud

- librariantiff 4 Comments

In between trips (because summer is all about travel, right?), I’ve been working in my new library to get ready for next school year. In addition to weeding and genrefying the fiction collection, I also had a few aesthetic projects in mind. I feel like there has to be some visible change in a space to get students excited about other changes. Back in 2010 I did some mid-year updates at the old CMS and summer of 2012 was a decorating frenzy as we moved into the new CMS.

Here’s the view of the circulation desk walking in before we started anything:

Photo Jun 21, 3 08 56 PM

I wanted to do something fun with the HUGE circulation desk staring you in the face when you walk into the library.

Photo Jul 06, 11 40 50 AM

Valspar makes this cool Tintable Chalkboard Paint that you can get in tons of colors! The guy at the hardware store recommended that we print with a bonding primer.

Photo Jul 06, 11 25 24 AM

After two coats of the primer, we were ready for color!

Photo Jul 06, 3 07 48 PM

The blue is one of our school colors and the green matches some of the furniture and gives a fun pop of color. Again, the paint took two good coats plus more touch up. We let it sit for several days so it would be fully cured. Then we primed the surface by coloring the entire surface. This was messy and made the surface not look perfect and clean like it does above, but otherwise when you start drawing on the surface, you’ll have ghost shadows of old designs. I read this blog post on Ella Claire Inspired by Vintage Charm to better understand this chalkboard paint situation.

Photo Jul 12, 2 51 24 PM

After it was all cured and primed, my mom and I got to play around with the chalk!

Another fun project was the library word cloud. I love using vinyl to create word clouds and wall quotes, but the area where I wanted to hang this was a little high. Instead of applying the vinyl directly to the wall, we bought a canvas and applied the vinyl to it. I was really happy with the result!

Photo Jul 07, 5 25 22 PM

You can see it below hanging in it’s proper place.

Photo Jul 12, 2 49 45 PM

I’m feeling good about the changes we’re making in the new library. As always, it will be a work in progress for quite some time. I’m very excited about the upcoming school year!