Tag Archives: Classroom Library

It’s all Greek

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We just finished our Greek Mythology unit in reading. This year my kids got so “into” it. I mean the kids usually  enjoy reading the Storynory version of the Iliad and the Odyssey, but my class this year has been consumed by everything Greek. Percy Jackson and the Olympians is the new most popular book in my library, and I have several boys who can’t get enough of the Greek basket in my library (this basket includes Greek Myths and nonfiction books about Ancient Greece). The other day at pickup, the sky was very ominous looking and it was blustery and drizzly. The student I was taking to the car shouted over the the howling wind, “We must have angered the gods!” Gotta love it!

I usually let my kids try hummus at the end of the Greek mythology unit, but last summer I got really into making my own hummus. Naturally, I decided to make hummus with them instead. This was one of the funniest experiences to date. The kids LOVED it. They wanted to taste and smell everything that I put in the food processor, and one of my girls repeated “This is the best day ever!” over and over again with every ingredient. Here is “Greek Hummus” in pictures:

Everyone wanted to try a garbanzo bean…

Put it all in the food processor

Little bit of lemon…

And we mash em’, we mash em’

A little math problem. We have 5 pitas, there are 18 students and 1 teacher in our class. How many pieces should we cut each pita into?

Eat it! Some kids loved it, some kids hated it, one kid said he liked it, then told me later that he “fake liked it”, whatever that means :)

Here is my recipe for Greek Hummus:

  • 1 can of garbanzo beans (chick peas)–drained, but reserve liquid
  • A few squirts of lemon juice (about a table spoon)
  • A good shake of salt (maybe a teaspoon or two)
  • A palm full of cumin (1-2 table spoons)
  • 1 heaping spoon full of Tahini
  • 2 cloves of garlic

Put everything together in your food processor and let ‘er whirl. Add some of the bean liquid until you have a smooth consistency. Serve with pita!

**Note: You know how much I love Picasa…here’s another reason! I used the editing program “Picnik” in Picasa online to pixelate my pictures for obvious privacy reasons. You don’t need to a fancy photo editor to make your student pictures Internet friendly!

I have a lot TO DO!

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Today is my final day of summer. Tomorrow I have a workshop, Friday I have to go to school to get ready for the workshops that I will be teaching on Monday and Tuesday. So what does a nerdy teacher do with her last day of summer? She writes a To-Do list:

Then she categorizes her To Do list into two separate to do lists: To Do “Home” and To Do “Errands”

Please do not judge Tanning on this list. I usually do NOT tan, but I have some significant hiking tan lines and Im in a wedding in a week and a half!

Please do not judge "Tanning" on this list. I usually do NOT tan, but I have some significant hiking tan lines and I'm in a wedding in a week and a half!

Confession: I have been known to write things on a To Do list that I have already done, just so I can cross it out. Crossing things off a list is so satisfying. So today I have been gleefully crossing things off my list! Wanna see some purchases?

This is the fabric I picked out for the pillows I’m sewing for my library! You have to see this one up closer:

How cute is that!? I try to stay very kid-friendly and gender neutral, and I’m not sure that this fabric fits that bill, but I LOVE it. I can’t wait to show you these finished pillows!

The next item I did not technically purchase!

No, I didn’t steal this box full of nail aprons. I went Home Depot to pick up a few house plants and 25 nail aprons for the backs of my chairs. You may be wondering, what the heck does she do with Nail Aprons?  One of my teacher friends had this great idea last year, she ties the aprons around her student’s chairs and the pockets are the perfect size for kids to keep their chapter books! (Way cheaper than those chair pockets they sell at teacher stores!) When I went to customer service to see if I could get a teacher discount, the manager gave them to me for FREE! Woohoo! Shout out to Home Depot! Seriously, they were so great. They wanted to know all about my class, where I teach and how I’m going to us the aprons. Thanks for supporting teachers Home Depot!

My other purchases are still in the car because they will go straight to school, but I’ll make sure to take pictures of where everything ends up.

Finishing touches

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Today was day #2 of “Operation Organize Oelschlager Classroom”. On Tuesday I just made the mess messier, but today I actually made progress in de-messing the mess! Did ya get that?! I am nowhere near finished, but at least it’s starting to look like a classroom.

I’m still debating about how to set up my desks for the beginning of school, right now I’m experimenting with cluster groups. The jury is still out.

So anyway, I decided small victories is going to be the name of the game, and I worked on one small area at a time: unpack box, evaluate keep or throw, find place for item. It worked pretty well and at the end of the day I was able to put the finishing touches on my library:

This was one of my Ikea purchases last week, it is such a cute rug, I just couldn’t pass it up!

Library before finishing touches.

Library after finishing touches.

Don’t the Shoe Chair and rug look fantastic together?  I wish I had enough money in my classroom setup budget to get TWO of these rugs–it is so fun– but on will have to do for now.

Meet my friend, Craig

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CraigsLIST, that is! Confession: I am a bit of a Craigslist junkie. When I get on one of my Craigslist  kicks, I will obsessively check it and hunt down the perfect item! This obsession served me well this week. It all started with a harmless trip to Ikea to get a few things for school (I’ll share those later). If you have never been to Ikea, and live within a 100 miles radius of one, I highly recommend that you go…just for the experience of it! After a scrumptious lunch of Swedish Meatballs and Lingonberries, we browsed Ikea’s showroom and when we got to the kid’s section we found this adorable Kara child sized chair:

I desperately wanted one for my classroom, but they were $80 *gulp*. Enter my friend, Craig! I did a search for  combos of “Ikea”,”Small”,  “Egg”, “Chair” and found three! I ended up by getting this exact chair for $20! Check it out:

And in the process of searching, I found this:

At $10 and in perfect condition, I just couldn’t pass it up! My kids are going to LOVE these chairs. Remember when I tried to find some library seating at garage sales? I didn’t have much luck, but Craigslist is like bringing the garage sale to you! Have you found any treasures on Craigslist?

The wave of enthusiasm…is dead.

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Remember that wave of enthusiasm I told you about last week when I excitedly made my way to school on a Saturday? Yeah, that’s dead. It ran out yesterday, on the last day of summer school. I promised my wonderful custodian, Jose, that I would have all my stuff put away by Friday (at the latest) so he could clean the carpets in my room.  (I saw the panicked look in his eye when he looked at my disaster)

What, you can’t clean around my mountains of boxes and random piles? After I  finished getting everything wrapped up at Summer School, I headed to my lair classroom, and I just stood there staring at the piles, as the  waves of enthusiasm slowly ebbed away, and disappeared into the ocean of Summer. So, what’s a girl to do? She starts stuffing things into cabinets, bookshelves, and drawers as quickly as possible, of course! (Is this the way anyone else “cleaned” their bedroom when they were a kid?) Caution: Do not open the big storage closet, or you may be hit by falling math manipulatives! I know I will regret this come August, but I simply could not be at school for a minute longer! After everything had been “put away”,  I drove my sleepy little self home, and took a THREE hour nap! It was like my body had been waiting for summer, and knew the exact moment it arrived.

I’m so glad that I went in last weekend, and I did finish the library:

Don’t you worry, even though I won’t have any trouble staying away from school until August , I still have lots of nerdyness to share with you until then!

Nerdiest Purchase I’ve Ever Made

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A few months ago when I decided that I wanted to organize and catelog my classroom library I decided I was going to need a little help. I imagined the 1000+ books that were stored in my garage and mentally calculated how long it would take me to type them all into Excel. And of course I would want to include the AR Level and Points, and while I was at it I wanted to label all the books into categories…I would probably be done by 2020, if I was lucky. So I did a little Googling and THAT is how I discovered the Intelliscanner, dun-dun, dun. Confession: One of my secret desires has always been to be a librarian. All my childhood books have numbers written in the covers, and my sister was forced to play library on more than one occasion. The Intelliscanner is basically a library scanner for the common man teacher.

This handy little scanner connects to your computer, scans the barcode on your books, and puts them into a fantastic software that looks a lot like iTunes. It loads all the information about your book, including the title, author, type of book, date, price, and even adds a cover picture (if available). It’s a nerdy teacher’s dream device.

Click the picture to see this up close

It would take me YEARS to enter all the information that this program looks up online for me. When you double click the book it gives you additional information, including a summary:

You can customize your own categories , and I created columns for the Reading Level and AR points.  You can order your books according to any of the categories by clicking on the column heading, so I can arrange them by reading level, author’s name, or type of book with just a click of a button.

I love this feature of the Intelliscanner Software, I can click the “Statistics” button and it breaks down my library for me. I have 1,325 books in my library with 845 unique titles. (I told you I have a book problem!) I also scanned in the movies I use in my classroom and the audio books I have in my listening center. It even tells me how much I spent on books if I paid sticker price,  I certainly hope I didn’t spend $6,320.89 on books, good thing I shop at Half Price books :)

Oh this next part just warms my nerdy, little heart:

I can lend out my books, just like in a real library. My kids will type in their name, and I’ll be able to keep track of who is reading what. I know, I know, what can’t this program do?

One more thing it can do, is that you can  share your library online with the handy little “Share” button. It publishes your library to your own website (for free!), check out mine here http://www.intelliscanner.net/aoelschlager/books/.  I love all the options and features that the Intelliscanner and software offers. Not only does it fulfill a childhood dream, but it is a great organizational tool and will help me manage my classroom full of eager readers.

Upcoming Post: An Intelliscanner alternative…LibraryThing

Every book needs a basket

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Here is Part 2 of my classroom library organization, just like yesterday, it is way easier to show you rather than tell you:

This was how I originally had my library...way back in my first year of teaching :) See how all the books are just lined up? Kids have a really hard time finding books this way, let me show you a better way!

This was how I originally had my library…way back in my first year of teaching :) See how all the books are just lined up? Kids have a really hard time finding books this way, let me show you a “better” way!

See how the cover of the books are visible? So much easier to browse and find what your looking for. But there is more to it than just throwing all the books in a basket.

First I went through ALL my 1000+ classroom books and labeled and categorized them! (that process will be another post!). Here are the book labels I created

First I went through ALL my 1000+ classroom books and labeled and categorized them! (that process will be another post!). Here are the book labels I created to fit the name tag holders I bought at WalMart. These sturdy, plastic holders will keep my tags nice and neat, and also allow for quick switches. Here is a link to my page with all my Library Resources

Here is my first round of book baskets, see my labels in the middle? I had 42 different categories, but only 30 baskets–but I got started anyway, I made a trip back to Dollar Tree to get some more baskets yesterday. Almost every basket in my library is from Dollar Tree and I’ve got a LOT of baskets, but at only $1 a pop it is much more reasonable than some of the baskets at WalMart or Target that can run $3-5+ each.

Big tub of books #1–I have 6 tubs like this, plus a few cardboard boxes full of books!! Luckily I sorted them all this spring and categorized them so all I had to do is put them in the corresponding basket.

See how I already have all the books labeled with the Library Section (Fiction, Non Fiction, Series etc…)

There is a colored dot sticker that indicates the Reading Level and the specific reading level and AR points is written on the inside cover. Yes, this took a LONG time, but I know it will make my Reading Workshop run so much more smoothly.

Whew! Here I have all my fiction books baskets on the shelves. I have a few more baskets to fill so I’m sure things will be shifted some, but this is how it will be in general! Monday I’m going to organize my Non Fiction books.

Half Price Books and Classroom Construction

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Wow, am I tired! But I’m a good kind of “I got something done today” tired. So here are the results of my Saturday at school, I have lots of things to share from today, but I’m going to keep this to an overview and then go into more detail on a later post. Confession: After I posted yesterday about Half Price Books, I got the itch to go check out the clearance section.

I just realized I never took a picture of my spoils, shoot! I bought 36 books for $1.00/ea–what a STEAL! The clearance section was the super well stocked, sometimes I go and the shelves are mostly empty, but today they were fairly bursting! I was planning on only  spending 20 minutes or so, but I ended up browsing for almost an hour. It was worth it. I got several great novels, Including The Wright 3 by Blue Balliett, I have the other two in this series Chasing Vermeer and The Calder Game, but The Wright 3 has eluded me, until today! (These books are amazing and unique, I highly recommend them!) I also bought several really good picture books and a couple of non fiction books, including one that is 50 pirate biographies, I know that one will be popular! I started adding picture books to my classroom library last year and I was amazed by how much my kids liked them, and how often I could use them in a lesson. Now I’m always looking for good 3rd-4th grade level picture books.

Ok, onto my progress! The easiest way to tell you about what I did today is just to show you, so here we go!

Classroom under construction: Altering this cabinet to fit my needs!

Classroom under construction: Altering this cabinet to fit my needs!

I literally had to climb inside this cabinet to get to the back peg holes drilled!

I literally had to climb inside this cabinet to get to the back peg holes drilled!

Ta-Da! Now my cabinet is ready for my classroom sets of books.

Ta-Da! Now my cabinet is ready for my classroom sets of books.

All my class sets of books in their new home, dont they look happy! (And organized?!)

All my class sets of books in their new home, don't they look happy! (And organized?!)

Ok, I’m going to call that a day. I did WAY more today in my room, but I want to do it justice and I’m out. So more about Operation Classroom Library tomorrow.