A brief note to thank Mother Nature

Yes!  I walked with FIVE classes to the Castleton Public Library in the past two weeks and we never got rained on. Today was the closest we came to canceling, but we took our chances and we made it.  In fact, it didn't even sprinkle until about 4:30 p.m.  So we were safe!

45 kids in total got brand, spanking new library cards to use in any UHLS library!  And many more students got to check out books because they already had a library card.  What a great collaboration and a way to help the public library kick off it's Summer Reading program.

Mrs. Charsky's class JUMPING yesterday!

I'm still on the search for overdue library books. This is by far not my favorite part of my job.  I never know good ways to make students more responsible.  Do you?  Little by little, books come back to me but I never get all of them back. I'm having a feeling that because I have so much going on this year, fewer books will come back to me because I haven't had time to go after them as much as usual.

The response for my Summer Book Groups has been great!  I even have a student signed up for all five (AND she bought a book for each one!).  I also got an email from a current 6th grader who saw it announced on the district webpage and signed up for one, too.  Life is good. We've been jumping with books and tweeting them to all the authors.  I think that makes them happy.  I am looking forward to jumping a lot at ALA in just a few days!

And more news!  Are you a member of NYSUT, the New York Teacher's Union?  Chances are you might know someone who is because there are 600,000 members! And an article about Kwame is in it next month with our kids JUMPING with HIM on the cover! Shhh…Don't tell Kwame, though!  In the next few days I need to figure out a clever way to unveil it for him at ALA.  I will give him copies of course.  My guess is he doesn't read this blog so my secret is safe here ;-)