Sunday, September 8, 2013

It's only just begun!

I know that it's 9 months away....the packing and moving that is...but only in the first week of school are all of the books on the shelf and in some kind of orderly order!  So...the past two weeks, as students came to the Library Learning Commons for orientation....they marked the hardback books they want to see taken to the transition campus. This way every child at RCE has a voice in the books being taken to the transition library.   It was most enlightening  for me to watch the books selected by the students as most took this job very seriously.  A few surprises - military books were some of the first to be tagged by the intermediate boys, followed by books on optical illusions!  Primary students quickly picked the books that their teachers had shared last year in author studies...you can definitely see a pattern.  Other surprises were the biographies and science books selected...I was glad to see they selected somethings that were not in the curriculum.

This year I am focused on e-books, that will add dramatically the number of books we will have at the transition campus...and...they are available to the students 24/7 when they forget about a "book report" that's due.  So many students at RCE have e-readers of some sort, I'm hoping the e-books take off this year...I also hope to have enough of a collection that the students will want to check out those that are available.

This year will be a year of changes in more than one way.  The idea of the Library Learning Commons will change as the year moves on and we move to the transition school and then on to the new building.  CHANGE.....

Here are some photos of the students "dotting" the books to be taken to the transition library....


Monday, September 2, 2013

First Week of school 2013

Yeah!  The first week of school has come and gone.  On the first day of school, Rummel Creek opened as it has for 51 years to smiling faces of students, teachers, and parents.  There were new faces, there were familiar faces, there were some faces that were excited, and others confused.  The Rummel Creek student population has changed over the pat 24 years.....when I arrived there was only 420 students  - now we have nearly 700. In 1990 several classrooms were only special needs classrooms, now we're nearly all grade levels with only a few special programs on the campus.  What a difference in the community as well...lots of new faces and new families.  Welcome to Rummel Creek!
On the first day of school, the parents and children lined up in front of the school waiting patiently for the doors to open.  The students were excited to see their teachers and their friends.  The first day as well as the rest of the week went rather smooth....except for one little bitty hiccup - air conditioning!  And you know how hot Houston can be in August!  But the students didn't let a little bit of heat keep them from doing their job.  

It's been a great first week of school.  It's also been a sad week...last first day of school in this building.  It's going to be a lot of lasts this year!