Disability History and Awareness Month

“Disability is a matter of perception. If you can do just one thing well, you're needed by someone.” - Martina Navratilova

NC Senate Bill 753 states that all schools will provide opportunities for all students to learn about people with disabilities and the contributions they have made.

Yesterday I was able to set up our small display in the media center honoring Disability History and Awareness Month. The books will remain on display throughout the month and will be replinished with additional titles as needed.

Here are a few pictures of our displays:

We also received a resource CD from the county with the following resources:

*A powerpoint presentation that can be shared with faculty on Disability History and Awareness month and the resources available to educators to comply with Senate Bill 753 (this is narrated and runs 8 minutes).
*Lesson Plans developed for elementary, middle, and high school students. These lesson plans provide lesson objectives and explicit instructions for the “how to” for each activity, including discussion, questions, observations to focus on, activities, and printer ready materials for each activity.
*Media Center Display ideas and information created in collaboration with WCPSS media specialists.
*Book lists related to people with disabilities (fiction and non-fiction) for each building level.
*Information on how to locate books about people with disabilities available at each school.
*Several vignettes portraying people with disabilities and how each person's disability affects their life.
*A powerpoint presentation that can be shared with students on people with disabilities and their contributions to our state and world.
*A brochure sharing information specific to autism awareness.

These resources are also found on the WCPSS website: http://www.wcpss.net/special-education/disability-awareness-month/

October Happenings

Behind the scenes in the NGMS media center things are in full swing preparing for Teen Read Week coming up on October 18-24.  Teen Read Week is an initiative of YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association) that promotes and encourages all teenagers to read.  The overall theme of TRW is "Read For The Fun Of It," and the sub-theme for this year is "Read Beyond Reality."

We will be celebrating TRW-09 by setting up several themed book displays and having a school-wide bookmark contest the week of October 19-23.  More information on the book contest to follow next week! 

October is also Disability History and Awareness Month.  We have a special display of materials set up to recognize and increase awareness of this month.  Also available to teachers, staff members, and parents is a wealth of information such as lesson plans, brochures, and a narrated powerpoint presentation. Please see any of the media center staff for these resources.

NGMS Fall Book Fair

Our fall book fair ran from Friday, September 18th through Thursday, October 1st. It was great! All of the students seemed to enjoy browsing and shopping for books, school supplies, computer games, etc. We more than doubled our sales last year, thanks to our amazing and tireless parent volunteer team and our extensive marketing campaign. Mr. Swensen was also a great help- running our own NGMS courier service to pick up our re-stock items daily from the Scholastic warehouse.

Each day in the week preceding the fair and during the fair students had the opportunity to watch fair commercials and short author clips immediately after the morning show. It is no surprise that some of the books featured in these clips were some of our best sellers.

In the first 2 days we sold out of many copies of the most popular titles! Our top ten books were:

Ultimate Coke or Pepsi/Dude
Distant Waves
The Chronicles of Vladimir Tod: Eighth Grade Bites
More Bones
Mythlopedia
Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Last Olympian
2009 Guinness World Records
Zoobreak
Wimpy Kid: Do-It-Yourself Book
Tentacles

Students even had the opportunity to pre-order the new book Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days which will be released on October 12th!

Some our other best-selling items were twister and money erasers, "fuzzy" pencils, and twister tube tornadoes. What fun!

With our profit we have purchased approximately 35 new books for the media center and a SMART board! :-) (Mrs. Swensen is particularly excited about this!) We will also have some cash profit leftover to purchase resources such as magazine subscriptions and DVDs for classroom use.

We are looking forward to another great fair in the spring!

Thanks to all who participated- students, parents, teachers, staff members, administrators, and awesome volunteers for all of your support! We could not have done it without you!

A year in the making...

Welcome to the first blog post ever on the NGMS Media Center blog! Last year we jumped off of the deep end head first and decided to launch a library blog for Teen Read Week 2008. We were super excited, got it all set up and then...

enter the sound of crickets chirping.

Needless to say not much else got done after that. So here we are 1 year later- Teen Read Week 2009 is coming up in 2 weeks and we've finally gotten around to putting up our first post.

Please bear with us as we start our new adventure in blogging! We will try to update as regularly as possible with information on media center happenings.

Check back soon for new and exciting information!