Welcome back, Eagles!

Hello, Eagles! I'm Mrs. Fournier, your Librarian. I am halfway through orienting all of our students to the library this year, and have a few exciting things to tell you about!

First off, let's tallk books! Checkout limits will be the same this year as they have been in years past:

PreK-K : 1 book
1st-2nd : 2 books
3rd-5th : 3 books

Books are checked out for 2 weeks. There are no overdue fees. I try to send home overdue notices once a week to let you know if a book is late.  If you lose a book, please send a check or cash in the amount listed on the overdue notice so I can buy a replacement copy for our library.  Last year, we had an amazing group of 350 students and 50 staff members because EVERY single book and person had an account in good standing when we left for the summer. Because of this, high student circulation rates, and Mrs. Fournier & Mrs. Lajaunie's tireless work in cataloging new books and weeding out old books to move up the average collection publication date from 1997 to 1999, we earned an award of $4,238 for new books this year! How amazing is that? Thank you staff, students, and especially to Mrs. Lajaunie for helping me achieve this goal! Thank you also to the Library Services Department for helping me make a big difference in our collection. We RRISD Librarians are so lucky to have an amazing administrative staff.

This year, I am excited to announce my new library assistant is Jacque Dickinson. Jacque started this week and has already learned a hundred things about running a library. I'm thrilled to have her working afternoons in here with me, and we're already becoming an awesome team!

This is my fourth year as the Forest North Librarian and I am always tweaking things to improve. In the past, our library always had a fixed schedule. Every class came at the same time on the same day every week, and we had a lesson, and we did checkout, and it was great. The problem is, the whole schedule was full of these classes already, and now we've gone from 16 to 21 classes! There aren't enough hours in the week to fit everyone in anymore. So, to fix that, we're moving to a flexible schedule. Flexible Schedules are highly recommended by the American Library Association because they require higher levels of collaboration between teachers and librarians. Check out their position statement on flexible scheduling. Here's my favorite paragraph:

"The integrated library program philosophy requires an open schedule. Classes need to be flexibly scheduled into the library on an as needed basis to facilitate research, training, and utilization of technology with the guidance of the subject specialist, the teacher, and the process specialist, the librarian. Regularly scheduled classes in the school library to provide teacher release or preparation time prohibit this best practice. Students and teachers must be able to come to the library throughout the day to use information sources, to read for pleasure, and to meet and work with other students and teachers."

I'm really excited to move to this flexible schedule, so that I'll have more time during the school day to catalog new books, keep improving our collection, plan my lessons and activities with teachers, help students get books every day, and work on my programming so kids have fun in the library! Stay tuned for our first programs of the year- the 2nd grade Rainbow Reading Challenge, the school-wide Library Bookmark contest, Texas Bluebonnet Award for 3rd-5th, and the K-2 Armadillo Readers Choice Award kickoff. It's going to be another great year in the Forest North Library!