IST Library and Information Literacy Center

We’re having a book sale

Eleanor Surridge — Mon, 14 May 2012 22:14:41 +0000

Next week, on Thursday, May 24, we will have a used book sale at the library. We are accepting donations—if you’re moving or just need to do a bit of spring cleaning, box up those books you no longer have room for and bring them to the library by Wednesday, May 23. And remember to stop by and shop for some great books at great prices next Thursday.

Classics to Read with your Ears on Lit2Go!

Mrs. Fitzgerald — Sun, 06 May 2012 23:42:40 +0000

Lit2Go is a website created and maintained by the University of South Florida. It holds audiobooks on mp3 files that are available for download from the site or through iTunes U. They have recently redesigned their site and it is a pleasure to browse the many different titles available.

Titles include many great classics of literature and non-fiction. The site is searchable by author, title, genre, reading difficulty and special collections of themed materials. The recordings are of very good quality.

You can access Lit2Go directly from this link:

http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/

or from the library OPAC‘s Visual tab. Look for the button “Online Children’s Books” and scroll down to Lit2Go.

Please note the licensing specifications as stated in the Lit2Go license agreement.

“A maximum of twenty-five (25) MP3 and/or text files may be used in any non-commercial, educational project (report, presentation, display, website, etc.) without special permission.”

You must credit Lit2Go with a full citation on your school work. If you use the mp3 files on a website, a link to http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go must be included on your site.

IST Library Parent Book Club Choice for May

Mrs. Fitzgerald — Fri, 04 May 2012 08:18:32 +0000

The IST Library-Parent Book Club had another fascinating discussion last week on the book, Away, by Amy Bloom. We all agreed that the main character was both memorable and complex, and her story will stay with us long after we closed the book.

Our May selection is a Panda Book Award title for 2012, in the Mature category: The Tiger’s Wife, by Tea Obrecht. Our library catalog (OPAC) summarizes the book:

“Natalia, a young doctor in route to an orphanage, learns of her grandfather’s sudden death and the mysterious circumstances that led him far from home, and in her efforts to understand why her grandfather, a rational man, would choose to undertake such a journey leads her to uncover a story her grandfather never related to her about his childhood during World War II. “

Be sure to click on TitlePeek, below the catalog image, to read reviews and other information about the book. In fact, you can enjoy TitlePeek for most of the titles on our catalog.

To access The Tiger’s Wife on our library OPAC, go to the main search page.

You can still register for the book club, by scrolling up to the top left sidebar and clicking on the registration link. We can only help purchase the book if you register before May 9.

Library Books Go Round and Round

Mrs. Fitzgerald — Thu, 03 May 2012 05:05:27 +0000

The grade 2 students are inquiring into the PYP theme, “How we organize ourselves.” As part of their unit, they visited the library to see how our circulation system was organized. They followed a book from the shelf, to the circulation desk, to a library and back again into the library and onto the shelf. See the Comic Life posters below to view how our library books go round and round. Click on each page to enlarge.

Poem in Your Pocket Day 2012

Mrs. Fitzgerald — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 01:32:02 +0000

What is Poem in Your Pocket Day? It’s a day to enjoy and share poetry. It’s very simple at IST. Carry a poem in your pocket, or take one from the many poetry pockets posted around school today and this week. Read it aloud to a friend, then listen to his or her poem. You may switch poems with your friend or with other poems in the poetry pockets. Fill your day with poetry today!

All photos are on our flickr photostream. Stay tuned. We’ll be adding more photos all day.

Going on a Poetry Bear Hunt with Michael Rosen

Mrs. Fitzgerald — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 06:28:03 +0000

April is Poetry Month at IST. The Spoken English committee is organizing poetry recitals for the elementary and secondary schools on Friday, 27 April. To help the elementary students prepare for it, our library sessions this week have centered on the elements of an excellent oral performance.

Michael Rosen, UK Children’s Poet Laureate from 2007 to 2009, is an excellent performer as well as a gifted poet. His poems for elementary school are full of joy in the English language and bring forth laughter and smiles from even our newest ESL students. What better way to learn about how to use expression, pacing, volume and articulation than by watching a master at work?

Students from nursery to grade 4 enjoyed 2 of Mr. Rosen’s rhyming books, Going on a Bear Hunt and Little Rabbit Foo Foo. Mrs. Fitzgerald performed Little Rabbit Foo Foo as a fingerplay poem and read Going on a Bear Hunt aloud. Grades 3 and 4 used the IST Spoken English rubric to assess her performance. She then showed a video of Mr. Rosen himself performing Going on a Bear Hunt. Mr. Rosen received full points on all of the rubric’s criteria. Mrs. Fitzgerald was told she needed to work a bit on her pacing as she sometimes goes too fast, but that the rest of her performance had full marks.

You can download the Elementary Spoken English Rubric here.

To view Mr. Rosen’s performance, please follow the instructions below. You will need to access the library OPAC — http://library.istianjin.net

1. From the library OPAC main search page, click on the Visual Tab.

2. Locate the Poetry Month button.

3. Select Poetry for Elementary Students.

4. Note that on the Poetry for Elementary Students Visual Tab page, we have two links for Mr. Rosen. One of those links is to view a clip of Going on a Bear Hunt from www.tudou.com, the Chinese YouTube. The other link is for his website. Unfortunately, the videos there are not available outside of the UK. If you are not in China, you could search for his performances on YouTube.

We hope you’ll enjoy Mr. Rosen’s performance as much as we did, and we especially hope that you’ll attend our poetry recitals, where students of all ages will be performing poetry of all types.

What’s the Weather Like in Grade 3?

Mrs. Fitzgerald — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 01:55:08 +0000

The grade 3 students are inquiring into the PYP transdisciplinary theme How the world works and focusing on how to measure and predict weather. As with every other PYP unit, I have put together a group of links for the third graders to enhance their inquiries.

To access the weather links, you will need to visit the library OPAC. There are four different ways you could access it.

From the IST’s website, www.istianjin.org, click on the Library OPAC link on the QuickLinks dropdown menu on the top right corner of the page.
From the top left corner of this blog, click on the link below the knocker icon.
From every classroom blog, locate the link to the OPAC on their blogroll (usually on the top of the right sidebar)
Learn this very easy URL, http://library.istianjin.net, and type into your browser. You might also want to bookmark it.

Once on the library OPAC, click on the Visual tab.

Follow the Visual Tab’s buttons along this path: PYP UOI–>Grade 3–>Weather.

The first button on the Visual Tab’s page for each unit is always the list of books for that unit. This book list is tailored specifically for the grade level and includes books in an appropriate reading level for the grade.

Go ahead and explore the different buttons. You may want to press the Command key on a Mac or the Control key on a PC to get the links to open on a separate tab of your browser. That way, you can easily go back to the library OPAC to click on another tab.

Art and Poetry of Douglas Florian

Mrs. Fitzgerald — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 22:50:26 +0000

I already knew I liked the poet Douglas Florian, but after reading every one of his books in our library collection for the 8-1-1 Challenge, I like his work even more.

Douglas Florian is a poet and an artist. Amazon lists 48 titles by him. Of these we have 18 and after this week, it doesn’t feel like enough!

The illustrations in his books are made in watercolor, and complement his poems well with their whimsical, dreamy nature. Most of his poetry books are humorous and greatly enjoyed by our lower elementary students. They would be great as mentor texts for teachers wishing to integrate poetry and science, as he has a beautiful series of books about animals that include quite a bit of factual information on the featured animals. IST teachers will be happy to see that we have a book in our professional collection to teach poetry with his poetry.

If you haven’t enjoyed Douglas Florian, be sure to stop by your library and pick up a book or two. You can also visit his website, http://www.douglasflorian.com, which features his artwork.

Here’s a screenshot of the Douglas Florian titles on our library OPAC. To view the list on the OPAC, enter “Douglas Florian” in the search field and click on Author.

The IST Librarians’ 8-1-1 Challenge

Mrs. Fitzgerald — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 08:05:42 +0000

As part of our celebrations for Poetry Month, we IST librarians have accepted a challenge posed by Matthew Winner of The Busy Librarian blog to read every single book in a particular section of the library. Since April is Poetry Month we decided we’d try to read every poetry book with the call number 811. That’s 272 books in all in only 15 school days, but between the 3 of us, we think we can do it.

: Our 811 poetry shelf, edited with WordFoto.

How will we communicating our progress? We’ll be posting book reviews on the library OPAC on the 811 books that we read for the challenge. You can see which books have already been reviewed by looking for the 5 stars icon on the record of the book. We will also be featuring a few of the books on this blog. First up, Douglas Florian. Stay tuned.

Are we reading every single poem in every single book? Well, no. We’ll be reading the jacket blurbs and enjoying the covers and we’ll be reading a few poems from each book. Still, that’s a lot of books and a lot of poems. Good thing that we have so many great poetry books in our collection! Click here for a list of all the 811 poetry books.

What other poetry sections do we have?

821-English poetry
831-German poetry
841-French poetry
851-Italian poetry
861-Spanish poetry
871-Latin poetry
881-Classical Greek poetry
890-Literatures of other languages

Want to join the challenge? Let us know in the comments.

The Goldilocks of All Databases – Just Right for pK-2

Mrs. Fitzgerald — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 10:28:30 +0000

Students in grades 3 and up at IST learn to use different databases for their research. Many of these databases are for advanced studies in different disciplines and they can be hard to read for the younger elementary students.

One happy exception to this is Pebble Go, a database geared specifically to students from kindergarten to grade 2. PebbleGo has two collections: Earth & Space, and Animals. Both collections are designed to support our young inquirers from preK to grade 3.

On Monday during their library session, kindergarten students saw a demonstration of PebbleGo to go with their new unit on the ocean. They are excited about visiting the database at home because it has language at their level, an easy-to-navigate interface and lots of interesting information about animals of all kinds.

To access PebbleGo, follow these steps.

1. Go to the library OPAC, http://library.istianjin.net and click on IST Library.

2. Log in with your personal account credentials or using our quick log in. You can find the quick login in your homework logs for grades 3 and up and on library bookmarks.

4. Scroll down the list of databases to PebbleGo. Make sure you take note of the username and password.

5. Click on the blue PebbleGo link. After you log in, select the Animals or the Earth & Space collections, then enjoy learning.

Need help? Come see us at the library.