Friday, January 28, 2011

Niah's Concrete Poetry



Niah, a 5th grader here at Forest North, has been hard at work! She got inspired after a library lesson on concrete poems. We watched a few videos, and Niah made her own concrete poems. One is about fish, and one is about hamburgers. They were a hilarious, detailed step-by-step how you cook fish or construct a hamburger. We matted and framed them up in the library! Stop by to see them, for as long as Niah can be parted from them, and check out these videos to see what inspired Niah:

Sunday, January 23, 2011

2010-2011 Forest North Bluebonnet Voting Results!

Ladies and Gentleman, I am pleased to announce the Forest North Texas Bluebonnet Award winners!

I will post the statewide official winners as soon as I hear!

1st place: 2nd place:
3rd place:

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Texas Bluebonnet Book Award Voting Party!














Forest North is proud to announce we had 85 qualified Bluebonnet Voters this year! That's up from 37 last year, and 7 the year before. Let's go Bluebonnet books!

Our 85 kids were treated (by 12 lovely volunteers, both staff and parents) to a Nintendo Wii party! Kids came in, got a free snack, poster and book. They voted for their favorite book of the year (winners to be announced soon!) and all took turns playing a variety of games on nine simultaneous Nintendo Wiis! It was amazing!

Thanks to all of our smart Eagles for working so hard! More later on the winning book and our 10 dedicated students who read all 20 of the Bluebonnet nominees!

Friday, January 21, 2011

New Books! Get Your New Books Here!

Mrs. Fournier has been hard at work figuring out ways to get more money for books! In addition to the money the district allocates per student every year, Mrs. Fournier also won a couple of awards!

At the end of every year, each library has to inventory all of the books. Scanning over 12,000 books is no easy task, and it's especially hard when you think about all the books that might go missing or get damaged. She has to hunt all those down (and might throw a popsicle party or two to get the ball rolling). She also has to find all the books that are missing or overdue. Then, she has to really think about whether or not there's room for every book. Since we only have room for so many books, and we're always buying new ones, some have to go. Librarians have to find out how good a book is for kids, whether kids will like it, whether it's clean, and how often it's checked out. All of that information goes into whether or not Mrs. Fournier continues to let it be on the shelf. Books that we don't use anymore are donated to Libraries of Love, which helps build libraries in Africa. It's founder is a librarian right here in Round Rock ISD!

Mrs. Young was an immeasurable help in doing all of this last year. Mrs. Fournier and Mrs. Young used teamwork to get it done! They did such a good job, and had so few missing books, and took out the right books (called "weeding,"), they won an award! Forest North got $4000 extra to spend on books this year! Hooray!

Mrs. Fournier also served on a special committee for the Theodor Seuss Geisel Award in the past year. Almost every day, she would gets boxes of new books that wanted to win the award. She's allowed to do whatever she wants with all the books and she's donating them to the Forest North library! Dozens of them are already cataloged and in the collection! Woohoo!

All of this adds up to over 1,000 extra new books for Forest North this year alone! Hooray for reading!

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Unusual Reading Spot Photo Contest

The Statue of Liberty. The candy aisle. A sculpture garden. The Liberty Bell. The neighborhood pool. A ski slope, a creekside view, the doctor's office, a cowboy ranch, or a rainy backyard- what do all of these places have in common? They're an unusual spot to read! Here are our awesome winners for the 2010-2011 Unusual Reading Spot Photo Contest! We had entries from Orlando to New York, with many famous landmarks and interesting poses! Check out our 10 winners. Their photos will be blown up to 11' by 14' and displayed in the library. Come to the library to check out our other awesome participants' photos too- it was so hard to choose just 10!






































Monday, January 10, 2011

2011 Theodor Seuss Geisel Award announced!


After one year, three trips, and about a million books, Mrs. Fournier and her fellow committee members were proud to announce their winner for the 2011 Theodor Seuss Geisel Award! As follows are our winner and our two runner ups. The 2011 Geisel Award goes to Bink and Gollie! Our honor books were Ling and Ting and We Are in a Book! Check out the fancy press release Mrs. Fournier helped to write here! (She and Linda wrote the one for Bink and Gollie!)
Multiple copies are available of each for checkout at the Forest North Library!