I predicted the students would love this wordless picture book but had no idea the emotions that would be expressed during class today.  When I closed the book, many had glassy eyes and tear streaked cheeks. I almost think that this (beautiful) wordless picture book could claim the 2024 Monarch Award winner.   

Fifth grade students took on the challenge to become more familiar with our district's eBook and audiobook collection.  For two weeks they explored the platform in table teams to accomplish as many challenges as possible.  During our final week we shared our collected knowledge with each other then with the school in for our latest bulletin board.

Congress Park was selected again as a recipient for the AISLE's LBSS Feed Your Need grant.  We applied for this grant to update our current Leveled Library collection and  are thrilled to be selected!  We are so excited to tell the students!

This week we opened our StarBooks cafe in fourth grade to feature our 2023-2024 Battle of the Books selections and our new District theme.  Students had the option to examine either the physical battle selections or go online to preview the selected titles.  Students who were not interested in battle had an extended time to self select titles of choice or browse our new featured books display.  In honor of disability awareness month, out district theme is Celebrating Differences.  You can view our featured books here.

Fifth grade students participated in their very first book tasting of the the year!  Their theme was historical fiction+ (we had a few bonus titles).  Students sampled the book selected for their novel study and selected their top choices.  Looking forward to reviewing the results!

Congress Park celebrated Peter Reynold's 20th anniversary of "The Dot." This book reminds us to celebrate creativity, kindness, and bravery. See Peter Reynolds talk about his book.

We are thoroughly impressed with how quickly students are adjusting to our routines and procedures.  We had many classes this week show responsibility by having 100% of the class returning or renewing books.  I don't think this has ever happened before! 

Kindergarten students have learned where their work tables are and are learning the traits of "Library Learners" with the help of Mr. Potato head.  They also learned hand signals to give to each other or that they may receive from me as a helpful reminder of the expectations.

It's going to be an incredible year to grow and learn together!

We've started checking out at CP!  Please remember that we are a library of CHOICE and any book can be returned if your child has decided it is not "just right" for them.  Students can come and see us (with classroom teacher permission) outside of their regular LRC time. We're happy to help find an even better one!

As we begin to take books home, please remember the top 5 accidents we see at Congress Park:
1.  water damage 
2.  younger siblings/children (marking on pages or tearing them)
3.  animal damage (Please NEVER allow your pet to read your library book without you!)
4.  Leaky lunch boxes
5.  food stains/sticky fingers

I'm excited to relaunch our library's website!  I hope you will find this site easy to navigate and helpful to see all the learning taking place in our LRC.  We're kicking off the year with our book fair.  Our goal is to help add books to home libraries and we use the profits from our fair to purchase birthday books for every student in our school, add new teacher/student selected titles to classroom libraries, and add high interests books to our LRC.  

Try some or all of these activities at home this summer.