Happy New Year from the Stafford Library! This year will bring many exciting events to our library:

We will be installing a listening center where children can listen to music that has been chosen by our fantastic music teacher, Donna Kagan.  this listening station was made possible through the spring social put on by the Stafford PTSA last year.

 The library will also host Elizabeth Rusch, a multiple award winning author who will be visiting Stafford on February 13th and 14th! As part of her visit, Ms. Rusch will be giving an evening performance for families on February 13th where she explores the life of Maria Anna Mozart. Ms. Rusch is the author of such books as “A Day with No Crayons”, “The Planet Hunter”, “Will It blow?” and “For the Love of Music.” Her presentations to our students will focus on her life as a writer and how research and inquiry helps her to write her books, which are primarily non-fiction. We are thankful to the Stafford PTSA, whose generous grant allows for this visit to happen.

Stafford will also be hosting our annual Science Fair on March 6th. You can find more information about this fair on our website. A Science Fair Inquiry Project may be:
 Experimental: typical science fair projects that detail an experiment and the process
 Observational: including animal behavior and environmental studies
 Models and Designs: including inventions and engineering
 Active Research: in any scientific field

Registration packets are available online and will also be available in classroooms next Friday.  Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions!

Last but not least, we have been working on updating our library blog.  On our blog, you can find resources for yourself and your child, as well as some pretty cool vidoes and games to enjoy.  Please visit this site often for updates about our library or to explore with your child. You can find our site right here:

Library Blog

Please feel free to come and visit us in the library when you get a chance!

Patrick and Julie

As the winter break approaches, we thought it would be a good time to give an update on the latest addition to Stafford- our new library.  As the design process unfolded for our library, our team at Stafford focused on making the library a learning commons- a place where students could engage in a variety of activities, not simply a place to locate and check out books.  As I walked through the library on a recent afternoon I saw:

• ·         Students curled up on couches and chairs, deeply immersed in their reading
• ·         Teachers meeting with students to talk about their reading and the challenges they were facing
• ·         Students using our online catalog to independently search for and locate books they were interested in
• ·         Students practicing speeches and giving feedback to each other
• ·         Battle of the books teams meeting and organizing themselves
• ·         Students using tablets and computers to research information for class projects

In short, our library is used by a variety of different groups for a variety of different reasons.  While our primary focus continues to be to offer a wide selection of fantastic literature for students to enjoy, our library will continue to grow in different ways to support the needs of our students and curriculum.  We will continue to build our online resources and will work with students on what it means to be a digital citizen and using the internet responsibly.  We will continue to work with students on using reading strategies to help them understand what they are reading.  We will continue to talk with students about the importance of choosing books that are at their reading level ( “just right” books).  We will continue to make sure that the library is a space that welcomes and supports many different groups who have different purposes.

Some of the latest news from our library includes:

• We now offer parents their own school library account.  Many parents come in looking for a book to read and share at home with their child.  This allows you to get a few books for home, maybe a second copy of a chapter book you’d like to read along with your student, and not impact the amount of books they are able to check out on their own.  We also have a wide selection of parent resource books in our professional library that you may access. If you would like to have an account, simply stop into our library and talk with Mrs. Hoover.
• Our Birthday Book Club is up and running again!  We will be holding our first celebration on December 14 at 12:25 in the library.  If your child would like to honor their birthday by donating a book to our library, we will be glad to celebrate with them on this day.  Thank you to Kate Hoots for helping us get this wonderful event organized!
• We have a small but dedicated group of library volunteers who have been providing tremendous help to us in the library by helping to shelve books and organizing our leveled books collection. If you are interested in volunteering in our library, please let me know.  This can often be a great way for grandparents to stay involved in their grandchild’s school, so please feel free to invite any interested grandparents!
• We have over 100 students participating in the Oregon Battle of the Books!  This competition is open to 3^rd, 4^th, and 5^th graders and we are pleased to see that almost half of our upper grade students are participating.
• We will be redesigning our library blog to be more user friendly.  Please look for the update soon!
• Finally, our library by the numbers:

• 586 active patrons
• 20, 609 books in circulation
• 1,623 books currently checked out
• 408 overdue books

As always, we encourage you to come and visit our wonderful library – we hope to see you here soon!

Patrick Minor and Julie Hoover