For the last six months, I’ve had the honor and joy of creating and implementing a reading dog program for our middle school students through the school library media center.  When I first came on board to this school in September of 2022, our principal invited all faculty to submit a grant application for monies available from our school cluster foundation.  While I did a therapy dog visit in the media center at Chatthoochee High (he became a regular fixture and also visits elementary schools!), I had never included a reading dog as part of my programming.  Since I am a devote ..read more

Yesterday I had the pleasure of leading reading/literary yoga with 6th, 7th and 8th grade students in our Reading Connections classes.  Students in these classes may be reading below grade level and need extra help growing their skills as readers.  Their teacher used the classic “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” as a common and accessible text for us to practice our skills analyzing and thinking about literature with a focus on these standards: ELAGSE8RL2: Determine a theme and/or central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text, including its relationsh ..read more

As some of you may know, I retired from public schools here in Georgia last summer because I had completed my 30 years of service and because my dad is undergoing treatment for triple hit lymphoma, a rare variant of diffuse large B cell lymphoma.  In Georgia, you can work as a 49% employee in any public school as long as you stay within the monthly hourly limits established by the state.  I have been working part-time since early September at a metro Atlanta middle school media center; it is a temporary position just for this academic year, so my time will be ending later this spring ..read more

I have encountered two significant challenges with my 6th, 7th, and 8th grade writers this spring: 1. I have a tremendous range in learning styles and abilities in each of my six writing courses.  Consequently, I have learners who always finish early, and I needed to find a way for them to use their extra time in a meaningful way and AVOID “busy” work. 2. Spring has sprung early in Georgia (as in 6 weeks ago), and students have struggled to stay focused yet energetic with their work as writers and learners. My secret weapon for this March Madness? Enrichment stations. I have created a le ..read more

Photo used with written permission from Zenonas Meskauskas https://www.flickr.com/photos/zenonas/34947565136/sizes/l .Ten years ago today, I began The Unquiet Librarian blog.   It’s hard to believe a decade has passed, but the years have passed in the blink of an eye.  When I began blogging, I simply did it to have a space to reflect on my practice, period.  So many other great librarians were writing and sharing their work, and I thought how fun it would be for me to do so, too. Ten years and 800 posts (!)  later, very few of the librarians who were blogging then are still doing so.  The enti ..read more

In my previous post; I outlined the work we did to: brainstorm topics narrow our topics conduct pre-search use that pre-search to finalize a topic choice generate questions about our topic using the question lenses chart finalize our research questions and complete an investigation plan/research contract In this post, I’ll explain how we targeted these skills with our research/inquiry mini-project: Adding sources to your bibliography in EasyBib. Taking notes with the notecards in your EasyBib notebook on your two research questions in EasyBib. Writing a strong introduction to your essay (the ..read more

On our third and final day of our Lanier Schools Academy Institute, we participated in a fun and engaging activity that reminded me of the Harvey Daniels written conversation strategies.   Lanier High teacher Brooke Webb and LSTC Rhonda Stroud led us through a variation of the Four Corners learning activity, dubbing ours Five Corners because we had five questions to contemplate in small groups about our district LMS platform, Desire2Learn.  Our essential question was “How can eClass (Desire2Learn) help my students with PBL?” Brooke and Rhonda ensured we were in mixed groups of grade levels an ..read more

Original photo by Buffy J. HamiltonAs part of the Georgia Teacher Keys Effectiveness System (TKES) , the common evaluation system designed for building teacher effectiveness and ensuring consistency and comparability throughout the state, we have an end of year conference with our supervising administrator.  My principal, Mrs. Jennifer Kogod, asked us to prepare a written self-assessment as a springboard for our face to face end of year conference. I wrote way more than than was required, but composing my thoughts on how well I did meeting my professional TKES goals was a great reflective exer ..read more

Today was the first day of our three day 2017 Lanier School Academy Institute, a professional learning experience for returning and new to the Lanier cluster teachers.  This academy provides teachers of all grade levels and subject areas opportunities to talk about project based learning across the Lanier cluster, to unpack how our cluster thinks about PBL, and to share and brainstorm ways we can craft meaningful and authentic PBL experiences for our students (and ourselves!).  I will be joining the faculty of Lanier High this July as an 11th grade English teacher, so I am excited to participa ..read more

 Please note that some handouts may not appear in their original format if you do not have certain fonts installed.  If you would like to know the fonts for a particular document, please contact me. Thank you! The research based writing unit for my 7th and 8th writing classes was one I would have preferred to have introduced earlier in the school year; however, I felt obligated to sequence and emphasize our units of study of informational and argumentative writing  in January, February, and March since they are a major part of the writing assessment on the state Milestones End of Grades test f ..read more