I've been a member of the readers' social network, Goodreads, for many years now. Every year, I set myself the goal of reading at least 365 books and I use Goodreads to keep track of them. Several of my overseas friends are on Goodreads, and it helps me to feel close to those distant friends through the books that we read.
Here's a screenshot of the top of my infographic. I wish it was downloadable as a pdf. I'd print it out as a poster! At the bottom of this on the page there is a mosaic made from the covers of all the books I read.
Go ahead and join up. Friend me and you'll see all my reviews. I don't often write long reviews but I do give stars to all of the books I read. You might recommend lots of good books to me, so I'm looking forward to seeing you on Goodreads.
Have you set yourself New Year resolutions? Let the CAC ES library help you keep them! (If you haven't set them yet, it's not too late!)
Scroll down the list to find inspiration for the resolutions you have already made for this year or for inspiration. -- One of my New Year Resolutions is to blog more so subscribe to this blog and cheer me on by commenting.
Eat more healthily as a family / Teach kids to cook
The ES library has a large collection of cookbooks suitable for children. The best way of ensuring that children eat everything on their plate is for them to be the cooks. Even little hands can help if adults handle sharp edges and heated surfaces. See here for a list of our cookbooks. You will notice that a lot of them are checked out, but if you log in with your CAC username and password, you can place holds on the books that are out. You will be notified via email when your titles arrive.
The 613 and 790 sections of the library have lots of titles on fitness and different sports. Come together as a family to the library to find exercise resources. We have an especially robust soccer section because we have so many soccer fans, and more are coming soon.
Stay in touch with current events / Help my children stay in touch with current events
The Visual Tab of the ES library catalog has a wealth of links to child-friendly news sites from all over the world. We are eager to have an even bigger resource, so if you know of good news sites for children in your language, please let us know in the comments or email me, jfitzgerald at g-cacegypt dot org.
Learn a new language
The CAC ES library has a large collection of books in Arabic and languages other than English. If your New Year resolution is to improve your Arabic, be sure to stop by for recommendations from our library assistants who are well acquainted with our Arabic collection. That is housed in our beautiful Egyptian tent, so do come and enjoy the collection.
Our "Multi-Language Collection" has books in more than 30 different languages. Most of these have come from generous donations of CAC families. If you would like to contribute by donating gently used books in your mother tongue, please see us.
Read more fiction / Read more non-fiction
With over 25,000 titles, there's a book for everyone at the ES library. Here's some ideas to support your new/improved reading habit.
Come to the library often. All you need is your CAC ID.
Challenge yourself to read all of the Caldecott or Newbery Award winners.
Set a number goal, e.g., 50 books this year.
Find a buddy to discuss your book choices with.
Start a book review blog, on your own or with a friend.
Pick up an CAC bookmark at the library. It has useful links for you to get the most out of the library online resources.
Download the Overdrive app on your mobile device and access our ebook collection. You'll need your CAC single-sign-on.
Ask us for reading recommendations. We love to talk about books!
Join a bookclub
The MHS library organizes a cookbook book club that is a lot of fun. Every month, we get together to sample dishes prepared from a selected cookbook. Meetings are usually on the last Wednesday of the month. Stop by the MHS library to browse through the book and sign up for a dish.
Want a reading book club? At my previous school, we had a parent-library book club. Members met once a month to discuss a book chosen by consensus among the members. It was a great deal of fun and a highlight of my month. If you are interested in something like that, let me know. We could start one here!
Welcome back to school! We hope you had an enjoyable and relaxing holiday, and that you read heaps and heaps of great books. Remember to log your minutes of holiday reading, if you haven't already. The link to the Million Minutes of Reading Form is on the menu of this blog. You will need to log in with your CAC username and password.
The monthly CAC Core Value focus for January is on integrity, and logging your reading minutes is an opportunity to exercise your integrity by entering accurate amounts. While it's okay to round up numbers to the nearest 10 or 100, please make sure to not inflate your reported minutes. We'll get there together and with integrity, or else the journey is not worth it.
Our preK teacher told me this morning that one of her preK students told her he wanted to "see Mr. Bagert again." That's probably true of all the CAC students who saw Mr. Bagert in action.
We had three dynamic days of presentations by Brod Bagert, during which he met with all the ES grade levels and 6th and 7th grade. He is an energetic performer and he kept us all wildly entertained during each of his assemblies.
As a teacher-librarian, I appreciated the humor in his presentations, his focus on writing from a child's perspective, and especially his tips on adding expression to your voice when performing: first make your face reflect the emotion you want to express, move your body to reflect that emotion, and then speak. When you do, your voice will express the feelings you want, without you having to think about how to do it. Your face does it for you!
But of all his advice, the best was certainly to "first, do your worst!" When sitting down to write, one should try to write as badly as possible. This means not paying attention to grammar, spelling, punctuation at first. Rewriting is very important because it is in rewriting again and again that we can make a piece better. He told us that he might rewrite a poem 50 times, each time looking for ways to make it a better poem. One of the fourth graders sitting near me, nodded his head, saying, "That makes sense." It makes great sense to me too, and I know we teachers will be reminding students of this important message for the rest of the year.
Here are some pictures from the presentations. They are taken from my very old phone, so they might not be very good photos, but they capture moments that were precious and filled with fun.
We have a table display full of books on compassion this month to go with our ES school wide core value focus. Well, I should say now half-full because the titles have been in great demand and many are checked out at every check out session.
How do we show compassion in the library?
We take good care of our books
We recommend our favorite books to our friends, so they too, can enjoy them
We respect the book choices of others
When we read fiction, we try to understand how characters feel
We make connections between text and our world, other books and ourselves
To see a full list of titles on compassion on our library catalog, you can visit the Visual Tab.
We all know the story of the lovable elephant who stands up for invisible people on a speck of dust. Horton shows compassion and integrity in protecting all of the little Whos even though he cannot see them and can barely hear them. All he knows is that they're people and therefore worthy of respect.
With The Seussical musical on this year, it's a great time to reconnect with Dr. Seuss.
Winner of the Caldecott Medal in 2011, this is the sweet story of Amos McGee, a patient and loving zookeeper. When he stays home sick with a cold, his animal charges come to take care of him in return. Compassion all around goes around.
One of my favorite books, Library Lion, by Michelle Knudsen, is super fun to read aloud because of the different voices and because of the lovable lion. In this story, librarian Mr. McGee forgets the importance of compassion for all library patrons, and the rule-abiding lion gently reminds him by example.
Another favorite. In this story, little Tomie teaches his grandfather to walk again after his stroke, just like his grandfather taught him to walk as a baby. This is a beautiful story of love and compassion between generations.
Patricia Polacco draws on a family story in the book about a Jewish family who helps their Christian neighbors one year when Christmas was in danger of not coming to town because of a bad scarlet fever epidemic.
There are three books by Patricia Polacco on this list and I bet I could find several more to fit. All of her books are gorgeously illustrated and heart-felt.
Since December is a short month, we will continue to focus on compassion until the break. That's fitting because the world needs a lot of compassion right now.
We had a such a great morning today for our Character Dress Up Day! Thanks to all!
First we had a read aloud by Sarah Gauch, who shared a few pages of her new book, The Tomb Robber and King Tut. Ms. Gauch visited the grade 3 Egypt Culture classes today, as they devote a unit to the study of Tutankhamen and his fabulous treasure trove. The ES library has two copies of the new book, as well as 3 copies of her previous book, Voyage to the Pharos.
After Ms. Gauch's short presentation, we had our character parade and oh, so many wonderful costumes of classic literature characters. I hope students had as much fun coming up with their costumes as we had seeing how clever they were.
My favorite costumes were the simplest: (although the amazing Rapunzel in the tower costume was amazing precisely because it was not simple! Sadly, I don't have a photo of it. If you do, please email me!!) Here are only a few of the many, many great costumes that we saw today.
The rabbit from Alice in Wonderland
Judy Moody from Judy Moody Saves the World
The Old Man and the C -- ha ha!
The Lorax
Splat the Cat
The Man in the Yellow Hat
Willy Wonka's Golden Ticket
The Phantom Tollbooth
Treasure Island - not a character, the whole book!
Judy Moody
Amber Brown
I was so busy with the assembly, I didn't have a chance to take more photos myself. I am looking forward to seeing the undoubtedly wonderful photos our school photographers will take for the yearbook!
The audience behavior of our elementary students today was exemplary. Well done, ES! Even though we were so excited with the parade and the author and the bookmark competition announcements, all the elementary students were attentive and respectful when it was time to listen. We're very proud and we hope this is a trend that will continue to improve.
Here is a short movie by our tech integrators from the parade. Thanks, Ms. Hebba and Ms. Ingy!
Congratulations and thanks to the 31 students who signed up to read their poems at the first ever Poetry Open Mic at today's family picnic. These 31 students showed courage and responsibility in selecting a poem - or writing one - and practicing the delivery on their own to perform today.
The parent picnic is a great CAC tradition and it is always wonderful to see families coming together on our ES lawn. Today's picnic had an even better attendance than ever. Thanks for coming, parents!
Here are some photos of our poetry performers. Please let us know if you have comments or suggestions. I hope there will be a next time and we want to make it an even better event.
Librarians and teachers: This was very easy to set up. I opened up a sign up sheet a week in advance and students had to read their poem to me first. This was to make sure that the poem was appropriate and to give each child a little coaching. I had poetry books available and I made copies of each poem, although every student was told that he/she was responsible over his/her poem. Most did come with their poems, but having the flat copies on a music stand made it easier for students to read while holding a microphone. Each student had to say his/her name, the title of the poem and the author.
