Librarian Without Walls

During the school year I try to read a couple of books from the CMS library. Here are three books I have particularly enjoyed in the last few months. At the top of my list is A Monster Calls , by British writer Patrick Ness.  Conor, the main character, is a 12 year old boy whose mother is suffering from cancer. One evening, just after midnight, a monster appears at his bedroom window. The catch is that this monster, which has emerged from a large yew tree up the hill from Conor’s house, is not the monster that Conor has been expecting. It is not, in other words, the monster of his recurring nightmare. This monster is ancient and wild, but not malicious. He has been summoned to help, he tells Conor, and that will require facing the wild truth. Conor has more to worry about than his mother’s illness. A bully at school has singled him out for special attention, Conor’s emotionally distant and bossy grandmother is making his life difficult, and his father lives across the Atlan

The Battle of the Books program has been around since the 1980s, but is still fairly new to Montana. Students read from a list of books and, in teams of up to three contestants, answer questions about the books. The teams that provide the most correct answers advance to the state tournament in Missoula. Students are grouped by grade levels: 5/6 and 7/8 for middle school. Last year, a team of fifth graders won a very close contest at the middle school and represented CMS at state, while an eighth grade team won the 7/8 category and placed third at state. At this time, Montana is using the Alaska Battle of the Books list of titles. But as participation continues to grow in Montana, we hope to develop our own list and practice questions. For a list of this year's books - all of which are available in the CMS library - click here .

On Halloween, fifth graders visited the library to put together insects they drew in an earlier visit. Fifth grade science teachers Amanda Bestor and Melanie Auch limited materials to those gathered outside by students: sticks, leaves, cattails, and so forth. We also let them use a little bit of foam craft paper. The results were often striking: intricate, creative, humorous. Take a look: Pine cones, dried leaves, glue guns, and two artists at work. The two bugs above hint at student creativity. These happy faces - on student and bug - sum up the day's cheerfulness. Fifth graders will be back in the library this week to build zip line racers. Yes, it's a glue gun world in the CMS library right now!

Play dough, batteries, and LEDs lit up the library on April 10 as Nick Wethington from SpectrUM led fifth graders in a STEM lab about electricity and circuits. As usual, Nick Wethington, from SpectrUM, introduced 5th graders to the day's activity. In the photo above, he uses play dough replicas of Mutant Ninja Turtles characters to show how to get the electricity flowing through small LEDs. There was no shortage of enthusiasm. Farah and Luci got into the spirit with several LEDs in one small play dough creation. Some students developed more elaborate creations, like the ones below: The next STEM lab is Tuesday, April 24. To find out more about how squishy circuits work, as well as more about the Making and Tinkering in the Bitterroot program, just click here  to view Nick's Instructables.

We are well into the second year of a making and tinkering program funded and supported by SpectrUM at the University of Montana. The initial program began with 5th graders and they continue to be the focus, and from the start teachers have embraced the STEM labs. New this year are Strawbees - think an updated version of Tinker Toys that use varying shapes of connectors and, as the name suggests, straws. Fifth graders tried out Strawbees for the first time last January, with some whimsical results: On the Friday before spring break, all of the 5th graders participated in a Strawbees challenge that urged them to build as high a freestanding Strawbees structure as they could manage in just 10 minutes. They came up with a wide variety of structures and some even managed to have some fun:   The labs will continue well into May with activities that will include circuitry of various kinds and some work with forced perspective. Many thanks to spectrUM and, especially, to

For the first time, Corvallis Middle School students have participated in the Battle of the Books. This is a competition in which teams of three, grouped by grade level, read a common list of 10-12 books and, during the competition, answer questions about those books. The titles cover several different genres, including history, realistic fiction, humor, and fantasy. About 30 5th and 6th graders and a dozen 7th and 8th graders participated at CMS. The 5/6 and 7/8 winning teams from Corvallis participated in the Montana State Tournament on March 13 at the Missoula Public Library. The Battle of the Books has been around for at least 30 years but is relatively new to Montana. Paige Merriam, a middle school librarian at Target Range School in Missoula brought the program to Montana from Alaska, where the competition is very popular. Paige and her colleague, Lisa Brennan, have been encouraging Montana schools to give BOB a try. Thus far, most of the participating schools are in

This blog represents an effort to move beyond my Corvallis Middle School Library website. That site seemed like a good idea when I created it four or five years ago, but in the last couple of years I have barely glanced at it, let alone updated it or encouraged my students and colleagues to use it. So, a blog. Which feels a bit behind the times, too. But I will give it a try. About the name, "Librarian Without Walls." I stole this from a presentation at the NCCE Conference in 2013. I have the opportunity to help out with the CMS Outdoor Education program. We take kids hiking and biking in local wildlife refuges and national forest trails, where we identify some of the local floral and fauna, write in nature journals, and do our best to take advantage of the wild places so close to us in the Bitterroot Valley. I am also involved with a MakerSpace program developed by spectrUM, and while much of what we do is within the confines of the library, we do look outward, includ