Jelly Bean Contest

It is that time of year again! Time to guess how many jelly beans are in the jar. Every year we diligently count jelly beans and place the jar on our circulation counter and let our students have at it. Personally, I enjoy watching how everyone goes about trying to figure out the amount. On the one hand you have your guessers who come in once a day to take a guess. On the other hand you have your mathematicians who will try and calculate the mass and volume and attempt to measure the length and width of the jelly beans in the jar and apply those math formulas learned in class. No one knows how many beans are in the jar but Mrs. Reed and myself and we are not telling. Winner will be announced on Thursday, April 1st. The prize is a huge Easter basket full of goodies. Good Luck.

Library on Burros

What a great story, just had to share.

Valentine Card Contest

Our library sponsored our annual Create Your Own Valentine Card Contest. Once again we had quite a few entries. Our Art teachers, Mr. Trejo and Mr. Estrada were the judges and both commented on the variety of entries and the creativity of the cards. Thanks again to everyone who participated and congratulations to our winners. Pictures of our students with their cards and prizes will be posted here soon.

Wiki or Blog?

I had pretty much decided a while back to turn our library web page into a wiki. Have actually been working on it off and on for a couple of weeks and had planned on linking it to our school web page in the fall and start off fresh. I recently read an article in the January issue of SLJ, "Putting your best foot forward" by Carolyn Foote on how some schools are using blogs as their library page. The idea being that it is in a format the students are used to and you can keep it constantly updated and fresh. One of the examples shown was Milpitas High School Library. I must admit, I liked the format and some of the widgets the librarian is using. I noticed that when you linked on the Pathfinders the links take you to a wiki. So even if we switched over to a blog format should we still keep our Wiki? Then why even switch? Maybe we should just keep our Wiki and continue to link our blog to that. Now the dilemma, should I switch? Our wiki is coming together, still needs tweaking though. I tend to use this blog for professional blogging and Porter Reads I have linked to school. Porter Reads would be the obvious choice if we decided to use a blog instead of the wiki. Decisions, decisions.

Birthday Song

A pleasant surprise. The Estudiantina came to sing The Maninatas song for my birthday. So many talented students on our campus.

Library Statistics

Well Porter Readers, you did it again. This second six weeks was just as busy as the first six weeks with everyone checking out books and magazines. In my last post I suggested that we should aim for 4000, well we hit 4003!!! That is just wonderful. The numbers are high once again in the 741.5 area but we had almost 1200 circulations in Fiction. New books are arriving soon so let's keep reading through the holidays.

Anime Club

Our wonderful Anime kids recently had a meeting in the library. They watched a video and our club President quizzed them afterwards. The winner received an Anime key chain. It was a hard quiz considering the video was in Japanese.