It's A Good Year

It's a good year.  Yes.  I've already decided - it's a good year in the library.  

Every August for the past three years I have found myself waiting in anticipation for the students to come back.   You see, when last May rolled up I wasn't quite ready to call it done.  There are still so many books to share, stories to explore, authors to celebrate,  projects to tackle, laughs to laugh, .... you get the idea.

This year in the library we will be designing our classes behind an exciting essential understanding (EU) based on this visual quote:  

Believe There is Good in the World.  BE THE GOOD.

I've been working on a display to place outside the entrance of our library that illustrates our library  EU. I'm always looking for things to do with the countless number of book jackets I receive from publishers after purchasing books for the school library.   When the library receives new books, the books arrive already cataloged and labeled with bar codes and spine labels.  Along with the Christmas day joy of unpacking box after box of glorious new books, there's always those one or two boxes of shiny, crisp book jackets.   I don't put these jackets on the books because they will cover the labels, but I can't seem to discard them either.  So they sit, pristine, in multiple boxes behind the fiction section of the library in a storage area I like to call the "cave".

Until last year.

I've started digging through the boxes and pulling out the jackets.  It's amazing to go through some of these jackets.  Some of these have been stored in the library from before I was even the librarian, it's amazing to look at how children's book illustrations styles have changed over the past 20 years!  It seems a shame to leave them boxed.  So I've started pulling them out, comparing colors and pictures and re-purposing them into new displays for the library.  The jackets have found their way onto bulletin boards, window displays, hanging pinwheels, and now this...

I can't wait to get started!