Duke Ellington and Data
Today I worked with a special needs class studying biographies. Every time this class comes I do a read aloud and we have so much fun talking about books and laughing together. Working with these students is always the highlight of my day, and I look forward to it. Since the students were working on biographies I selected some biographies about Duke Ellington along with a poetic picture book featuring Duke Ellington titled Ellington Was Not A Street to use with my mini-lesson. When the students walked into the library I had a video playing of Duke Ellington performing "Take the A Train" and "It Don't Mean A Thing." The sound was turned up nice and loud. We danced over to the biography section and watched a video and danced some more. Then, we looked at biographies. I told the students about Duke Ellington and showed them the books about him, and then read Ellington Was Not A Street. We danced again as we watched another video. Then the students checked out biographies, and left me . . . better than they found me.
Being the first of the month, it was data day! I sang to myself, "It don't mean a thing if you ain't got that swing" as I tallied and compiled the monthly numbers for my principal and was relieved to find the circulation numbers for January 2012 were the same as last January. I am happy not to be seeing lower numbers as I did with December's depressing circulation data. I added a "professional development" category this month to document the number of workshops or presentations I make to our faculty. This month, in addition to e-mailing my report off to my principal I decided to take some advice given by Jennifer LaGarde aka Library Girl and actually post my data. While, my data posting is on a much smaller scale, it is a start. I plan on adding more data that students will find interesting such as most popular books.
