- First day of new schedule, now working Monday evenings
- Clearing up of accumulated Monday morning work
- Training new summer aide
- Began plotting theft of colleague's summer intern. Waaaaaant!
- Another reading record crisis
- Panic
- Booked fall program with Kohl's Wild Theater
- Posted about upcoming Saturday programs on Facebook
- Patron found that some of the kids had rearranged our display Legos into...inappropriate positions.
Tuesday
- Last big school visit, 9am to 2pm
- Note to self - you cannot do a full elementary school visit on a piece of watermelon and a muffin. You will feel sick. Visit to grocery store.
- Sorting school visit books, new books, other libraries' books. Things have got confused.
- Drove over to next town to pick up the rest of the missing reading records
- also some mulch. I don't know if my ongoing war with the squirrels is increasing or decreasing my stress
- More sorting and beginning to clean and organize storyroom, which currently has my summer supplies lying in heaps all over the floor and tables.
Wednesday
- I came early to set up for the 80 fifth graders and teachers who visited from 9 to 10:30. I did a short tour, then a scavenger hunt, then book talking in the teen room. This went much better than I had expected! The kids were all reasonably well-behaved (I'm not counting the character whose question was "when are you going to stop talking?") and enthusiastic. The tour is kinda hard, b/c of the sheer numbers, but there's nothing I can do about that. One teacher suggested splitting the kids for scavenger hunt and booktalk and since it sounds like everyone would like to repeat this again next year, that's probably what we'll do.
- Major cleaning of storage room - head of circ very kindly took time out of her insane schedule to drive over to Lowes and get another giant metal shelf (she has a truck!) and then helped me put it together. More cleaning, organizing, etc. etc.
- Finally decided enough was enough and left around 5:45. Will continue tomorrow.
Thursday
- 2nd grade class from the elementary school came for a tour and storytime
- Was planning to get my June order finalized, but encountered a massive issue with Amazon (our fault, not theirs!) and spent about 2 hours fixing it.
- Finished cleaning and organizing storyroom.
- Went home a whole hour early!
Friday
- Took the morning off, went in to work at noon.
- Cleaned off desk.
- Finalized my June order
- Got most of my first storytime for June finished (I know, I'm late! It's all that sleeping in since there's no storytime, ha ha ha).
Saturday
- Summer reading kickoff. I was at the library at about 9:30, along with one of my aides, to get everything set up. New books, tables, displays, summer reading, the works.
- From 10:30 to 12 we had the Welty Environmental Center they were awesome!
- The local animal shelter brought some dogs by for a few hours
- The adults were doing things but I didn't pay much attention.
- One of the teens brought by a fish tank and set it up for us! We'll see how it goes - all the other fish I've tried have died, after first driving me crazy for weeks by looking dead, thus inspiring an endless series of "is the fishy dead? why does the fish look sick?" questions.
Roundup of School Visits:
Pigeon vs. Elephant and Piggie - Pigeon wins, hands downMost requested beginning chapter book - Hooey Higgins (even the older kids want it)
Loudest yells - Star Wars party
Most frivolous request: Fashion Kitty (mostly by fifth grade boys)
Most requested book I did not have a good booktalk for: Adventures of Beanboy by Lisa Harkrader
Most asked for book that I wasn't 100% sure was appropriate for sixth graders: Bunheads by Sophie Flack
Gross science book of the summer: Exploding ants by Joanne Settel tied with Disgusting Hagfish by Meish Goldish, but the Disgusting Hagfish got a kid sent to the principal's office, so it wins the tie.
Personal favorite booktalks: Fangbone, Third Grade Barbarian and Fluffy Fluffy Cinnamoroll
4 comments:
Seriously. You need to find some volunteers who will come and help cut pieces of paper for craft time and such like. I have to recruit some new ones next year, but it is such a relief when they come in that I have ALMOST gotten over my guilt. Good luck, and deep breaths.
I do have a couple volunteers every summer and an additional part-time aide - I'm still trying to figure out how to utilize volunteers without it actually adding to my workload. I am having them do more of the display stuff this year, but they can't plan or run programs, shelve, or do any of the organizational things that are making me crazy!
Volunteers can't shelve? Oh, my. That's the main thing I have mine do! That, and glue books back together. And, of course, anything that involves decorating anything!
Our staff is unionized and resistant to change. They also don't care much for teens. Our processor would..um..not be happy if I let kids mend books.
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