Celebrating Reading in March

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We've been celebrating reading all month long with special days and special author visits.

For Read Across America, a couple classes were able to connect with other classes in our county to share a book.  The kids got a kick out of seeing each other on the screen.

For World Read Aloud Day, several classes were able to connect to some fun authors through Skype.

A kindergarten and second grade class connected with Melissa Guion.  She was so much fun!  

She read her books Baby Penguins Love Their Mama! and Baby Penguins Everywhere!  The students loved her illustrations and the way she read her stories.

She sent us a special penguin picture that she drew just for Moreland.  She even incorporated pizza and tacos in the picture because the students mentioned it during their Skype visit.  It was close to lunch time, so they had food on the brain.  But how cool is it that she remembered that and made it part of the picture?

A fourth grade and fifth grade class was able to Skype with author Geoff Rodkey, author of the Chronicles of Egg series.

He spent a bit of time talking about his books, as many students weren't familiar with them. (We don't currently have any of his books in our library...going to remedy that soon!)  He showed the different covers of the same book for different countries. That was really interesting.  Then he gave the kids a chance to ask him some questions.  He was really entertaining, and I think a couple of students went out and bought his books that afternoon.

We also had a special visit today from children's book author Kay Heath.  She visited with Kindergarten and second grade classes. They had a blast.  After her visit she stayed and autographed copies of her books for any student who purchased one.

It has been such a fun month of celebrating reading.  Did you do anything special this month to celebrate reading?

Skypeing in the Media Center...Finally!

You might remember from this post that I had a goal to try to do some Skype lessons.  Well, as it so happens, I got my ducks in a row early in the year and was able to sign up for some Skype library time with Jenny Levinson, a SLMS in Florida.  We have Skyped a couple of times now and the kids really enjoy it.  I think it's fun for them to not only get to have storytime from someone different and new, but also for them to get to experience that technology.

The first Skype session was with a smaller class because I was a bit nervous about how it would go.  There were a few minor sound issues, and one student lost a tooth during one of the books, but other than that it went well.  The kids seemed to enjoy it so I decided I would try my hand at it again with a larger class.

The next class was a very active Kindergarten class so I was super nervous again. But they did very well, especially considering that we were having sound issues again.  The kids were so cute reading along and they got a kick out of Ms. Jennifer talking about the things she could see them doing.

After this second lesson, I began doing a little technical search to find out about the sound issues and found it has to do with our bandwidth. Unfortunately, the only way I found to fix this problem is to increase the bandwidth and I don't think my county is going to pay for that just so that I can do Skype lessons. So I either try it with an iPad and Apple TV or the app Reflector to see if that will work, or just live with the cutting in and out.  I definitely want to try Skypeing again.  However, I want to fix the sound issue first.

Anyone having this same issue and have any suggestions (besides increasing the bandwidth)?

P.S.  You can find me on Skype @MESMediaCenter.