I’ve been thinking a lot about people graduating from college and entering the world of education. I made a little video for them.

Please consider sharing it with any new teachers you know. I want them to know how thankful I am that they decided to join me in this amazing profession.

Fidget Spinners are the new craze! My students love these things. I’m not going to lie: I would have been all over these things when I was a kid. They are super cool! One of my students made one at home. How cool is that? I talk more about it in my #BestPartOfMyDayVideo.

The Parma Elementary PTA is amazing. I walked into the school today and found each and every door in our building was decorated. It was amazing. I cannot image how much time they spent over the weekend getting things ready. I am blessed to teach in such an amazing school.

I am honored to have the opportunity to present at two of this summer’s Scholastic Book Fairs Reading Summits. I’ll be presenting with my principal, Sue Haney about the things that the teachers, leadership, parents, support staff, community members, and students do to help build a culture of readers in our building.  We will be presenting at both the Scholastic and Seattle Reading Summits.

If you are coming to a Reading Summit you get this amazing package (below). I don’t know about you, but I could sure use a new copy of Dogman. My students have already loved their way through multiple copies of that book.

For more information about the Reading Summits click on the image below or leave me a comment below. I’m hoping that our paths cross this summer.

My students and I have been blessed this year to have Margie Culver (@loveofxena) visit our classroom each Friday after lunch. She reads to us, teaches us about storytelling, and book talks some of her favorite books. It is always one of the best parts of my week.

Check out Chapter One

I’m excited to add some new books to my classroom library this week. A bunch of books are joining us, so I am going to break this post down into two or three blog posts.

Where the money is coming from: This year, each elementary classroom in my district received $250 to help build their classroom library. I used that money to purchase the books in this post.

Where I bought the books: I purchased these books from Bookbug, an independent bookshop in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Bookbug is my favorite bookshop in the world, and I try to purchase as many books from them as I can. They are always very helpful, and they do an amazing job of making sure all of my needs are taken care of.

What I bought:

Today, I’m going to share the books that I bought to replace books in my classroom library that are replacements for books that we already had. These copies are either replacing copies that have gone missing, or copies that are falling apart.

Hilo is the hottest series in my classroom this year. Can’t keep these books on the shelf, or in my classroom. They keep disappearing!

My students that love this series, REALLY love this series. They read them over and over and over again.

Our copy of Sticker Girl has been missing for months. I get sick of not being able to hand it to a kid when they asked for it, so I replaced it.

My classroom copy of Love That Dog is so ragged that I had to bust out my signed copy to let kids read. Now that copy is falling apart. New copy purchased-problem solved.

I had to purchase a whole new set of Mal and Chad. The copies I have are so worn out that they are missing pages. Kids continue to read the partial books, but that seemed wrong.

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In chapter three I’ll share why I purchased 4 Duncan Tonatiuh books, and a Grace Lin book that I hope my student read both with their ears and with their eyes.