Mrs Simon says . . .

Source: https://www.pickpik.com/magic-fairy-lights-time-decoration-lights-bokeh-81752

Transition is not the best vantage point from which to view a conference. On 3 May, I had three more days of being a teacher librarian and 24 days left before becoming a university lecturer in teacher librarianship. Therefore, while I did enjoy many of the presentations, I don’t feel I got as much out of the conference as I would usually do when participating as someone fully invested in a current position.

That said, I did find it very powerful to hear some of the stories behind the stories presented by the authors, illustrators and curators in the sessions. From the keynote sessions to the workshops to the tours, every session had something to offer. It was an enlightening day.

My overall takeaway was to renew my passion for the power of story. Stories shape our lives and journeys and give us inspiration to innovate, change, explore and recreate ourselves and our knowledge. I was especially inspired by Bruce Whatley’s journey as an illustrator and artist – his passion for experimentation and for finding different ways of working to accommodate not just the stories he wanted to tell, but also his changing physical capabilities – gave me courage about plunging into my own new career adventure. It is something that I think would be valuable to share with students, as well, to let them know that they do not need to be feel pigeonholed by either their failures or their successes. Just because they have done something well doesn’t mean they are stuck doing that for the rest of their school journey… or even their lives. We can light up our paths with experimentation and reinvention.

Onward I go – continuing to write my story with a new chapter at Charles Sturt University.

Well! That was a longish hiatus. To be honest, I had left this blog for so long that I forgot where to find it.

 

via GIPHY

After several unfruitful attempts (that uncovered my old crafting blog and a WordPress site that I opened but never actually developed), I finally hit on searching my emails for the term blog and that eventually led me back here!

I am about to have a major change come up in my career path and it made me think that it might be time to dust off the keyboard and try blogging again. We’ll see if I can keep track of where I’ve put my thoughts a little better this time around! Hopefully I can be more consistent and frequent as well.

 

Hi all!

Dr Seuss’ birthday is coming up on 2 March and I have Dr Seuss-based lessons planned for Library throughout the week. This will also be my first week with the students this year (hopefully) as I injured my foot a couple of weeks ago and am hoping for the go-ahead from my physio to go back to work in March!

EDITED 23/02/2021 TO ADD: Mary Verdun, a member of a Facebook Group where I posted the Stage 3 slideshow posted a link to the following paper which looks at racism, anti-semitism and orientalism in the work of Dr Seuss/Theodore Giesel. It is an interesting read and raises questions that I am thinking through and which may change my decision on whether to use these plans next week. The paper’s citation is:  Ishizuka, Katie and Stephens*, Ramón (2019) “The Cat is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss’s Children’s Books,” Research on Diversity in Youth Literature: Vol. 1 : Iss. 2 , Article 4.
Available at: https://sophia.stkate.edu/rdyl/vol1/iss2/4.

For Kindergarten, I will be focusing on rhyme and onomatopoeia with the entertaining Mr Brown Can Moo, Can You? Last year’s group seemed to enjoy this book and it is good to dramatise and use with a bit of call-and-response, which suits the younger As a reading response, I will be having them assemble and colour some flipbooks I found here: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Flip-Book-for-Mr-Brown-can-Moo-Can-you-by-Seuss-Sight-Words-Vocab-FUN-2423162 . I think I will only choose 4 – 6 of the possible phrases because we don’t have a long time once we’ve read the story and students borrow. This will be my first meeting with this cohort of Kindergartners… I hope they like it!

Stage 1 will be listening to the madcap Ten Apples Up on Top and making a connection between the text and themselves. I was inspired by a worksheet I saw on Twinkl to create my own, simpler version (to suit my cohort and time availability) that can be used for various books.

S1 Text to Self Connection.

Time willing, we will read The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins with Stage 2. I read this to Stage 2 two years ago and they seemed to engage with it, so I am hoping it will tickle the fancy of this year’s cohort as well. I was struck at the time with the juxtaposition of some beautiful descriptive passages with black and white illustrations (highlighted with touches of red). Therefore my focus tasks this year will be on visualisation and description – with a choice between drawing a hat and describing it OR reading a descriptive passage from the text, drawing a picture to match it, then highlighting the words and phrases from the passage that are evident in the picture.

S2 500 Hats Draw and Describe

Finally, I decided to go a bit more mature for Stage 3. We will be looking at a biography of Dr Seuss from the Seussville website and then at some of the politicsl cartoons that he created in the World War II era. You can find a good collection of these at the University of California San Diego Library Digital Collections site. I have created a slide presentation that can be accessed below. Hopefully this will not be too mature for the students and they will find it engaging to see a different side of a familiar author.

Dr Seuss Political Cartoons (PowerPoint presentation)

Well, that is all from me, folks! I’d love to hear if you have any plans for celebrating Dr Seuss in your libraries.

My school is working through the professional learning modules prepared by the NSW Department of Education to accompany the What works best: 2020 update published this year by the Centre for Eduaction Statistics and Evaluation (CESE)(2020). I found my reflections on certain areas – especially assessment and effective feedback to be tricky to complete because my library lessons are release from face-to-face teaching (RFF) and cover transitions to and from classes, borrowing/returning of library books and whatever lesson and learning activity I offer all within an hour. In my current model, the response activity to the lesson is not always done by all students (and certainly very rarely completed by all students) because browsing the shelves and borrowing is done at the same time as the response activity (to control traffic in our current small space).

I was especially thrown when asked what evidence I have for my impact on student learning outcomes. My initial answer was that I don’t really have any, but today I was thinking that I may have some data to show after all (offering somewhat indirect evidence).

This reminded me of my post from a similar time last year when I finally got the courage to check on comparative borrowing statistics between the year prior to my hiring and my first year on the job. My thoughts on evidence this year came from finding the courage to look at the records for previous years’ Premier’s Reading Challenge (PRC) completion to assess whether my efforts, which I deemed underwhelming, had made any difference to participation in Years 3 – 6. To my utter shock and surprise, I found that more Year 3-6 students had completed the challenge this year, compared to last year. Also, in both of my years of overseeing the challenge there were more Year 3-6 completers than in the three years prior to my arrival. I was feeling like a failure because I was comparing my efforts to promote the PRC with that of other teacher librarians at other schools on social media – when I compared myself with my own school context, however, I could see evidence of growth.

When I saw that data, I realised that data regarding borrowing patterns and participation in PRC and other literacy-based activities could be used as evidence of my impact on student outcomes. While not as direct as reading or writing test scores, data regarding students accessing and reading a variety of quality texts shows evidence of my impact on their literacy outcomes, especially if taken in combination with improvements in test scores.

So my main takeaways from this experience:

1. Don’t sell myself short – think creatively about how what I do contributes to learning outcomes.
2. Realise that the data and evidence I can show will be different to that of a classroom teacher – and that is okay.
3. Don’t compare myself and my school context to other school contexts, and don’t let myself feel like a failure by comparing my efforts to the successes of others.

References

Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation. (2020). What works best: 2020 update. NSW Department of Education: cese.nsw.gov.au

Simon, M. (2019, November 24). Confidence and bravery [Blog post]. Mrs Simon says. Retrieved 10 September, 2020 from https://marikasimon.edublogs.org/2019/11/24/confidence-and-bravery/