Letter to Myself #EduLS

This weeks Educator Learning Series (#EduLS) is to write a letter to yourself about this school year. I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone and do my Slice of Life and my #EduLS all in the same blog post.

This has been an awesome year!  It's my second year in the library and I'm starting to feel like I have this job down.  I still have room for improvement of course but I'm much more comfortable in this librarian skin this year than last year.

I was on a flexible schedule this year and was able to really be a librarian.  I had student and faculty book clubs.  I was able to help the teachers more.  My displays were better.  My lessons were better. My library just flowed better.

My book club students and I brainstormed during our last meeting on how we could make the book clubs even better next year.  They want to research books to read, watch the movie if the book has one, they want me to send out reminder letters of upcoming meetings, and make posters of book club dates to put up around the school.  I thought these were all excellent ideas that we can easily implement next year.

I want to collaborate better next year.  I did better this year than I did last year but I still feel this is where I can improve the most.  I plan to pick one or two teachers to work with at the beginning of the year and hope to add a few more as the year progresses.  I hope that working with one or two that they will tell other teachers what we are doing together and word will spread and other teachers will be more willing to let me in and help.  I need to teach them what I have to offer, I need to stop expecting them to just know what I can offer.  Another idea I got from my librarian twitter chat (#txlchat) is to host a planning session in the library. I'll provide snacks and as I hear them talk about different lessons I can start pulling books, finding websites, finding apps, pulling up databases, etc for them.  I ran this by our curriculum specialist and she thought this was a great idea.

I have 20 magazine subscription this year.  According to TLA standards that's excellent!  But I want students to be able to check them out next year so I need to do some work on that.  I also want to organize them better.  Right now they are all just thrown in the magazine rack.  I'm going to label the slots with the magazine's name.  I want it so that students can see what I have better.

My library webpage is up and running.  I'm very proud of it!  Our high school librarian worked hard on her webpage last summer and was gracious enough to share the basic template with the rest of the librarians in the district.  I have everything done except the policy page.  Next year I would like to add some videos about new books, me reading books, and who knows what else.

I read 7 (I'm on my 8th) professional development/motivational book this year.  I've NEVER read so many PD books before in my life!  I am a better person and librarian because of these books.  I plan to continue this practice for forever!

Overall I'm very proud of what I've done in this library this year and can't wait to improve more next year!