Stuart-Hobson VMJ Library Update

It's hard to believe that school is coming to a close in just a few short weeks! Here is what the library's schedule is going to look in these last weeks.

May 24 - library closed at lunch for Book Club meetings

May 25 - library closed all day for new book shelving

June 2 - last day for book checkout and for the library to be open other than at lunch

June 9 - last day for library to be open at lunch

June 10 - book club meetings at lunch

I will be sending out overdue notices this week and start trying to collect books from students over the next several weeks. If you could please ask students to check their lockers, and have classroom librarians go through all of your classroom libraries to check for stray books I would greatly appreciate it!

The library has finally received our big order of over 2000 books! It took some time, but it is so worth it. We have a team of people coming Wed to help label and shelve the books so the students can get a chance to check them out before school ends. This order helps more than double our collection this year. Between our allottment order, a First Book grant I received, a few first book donations and some community and parent donations we added a total of 4,406 books this year. We now have over 7500 books in the library.

I have been working all year to "genrefy" the library and it is finally complete. While I am a fan of Dewey and always will be, we needed to modernize the way our books were categorized to match our new modern library! Now all books are in genre sections (including nonfiction). We have sections such as: humor, sports, fantasy, U.S. History, the Holocaust and Biographies. I am still working on signage, but come check it out when you get a chance.

Thank you to all the teachers who brought their classes down this year. From small groups working on projects, to Hour of Code and full class lessons I loved having the students using the library. As we continue to build the library's collection I hope that we will have more classes next year take advantage of the library's resources!!

Thank you to the PTA for the multiple grants this year allowing me to hang some fantastic posters and to hold book clubs at lunchtime. The PTA also funded our laminator repair - so teachers if you need something laminated, it is now located in the library office and will be available to you during lunch for the remainder of this year.

Thank you to to DonorsChoose and all of the donors who helped fund my project to get games into the library. The students have truly enjoyed playing chess, checkers, dominoes, rubik's cube and snap circuits!!

And finally, thanks to everyone who helped with the library modernization and with helping me to feel at home at this fantastic school!!

Email: mary.kurspahic@dc.gov
Website: http://www.capitolhillclusterschool.org/
Location: Stuart-Hobson Middle School, 410 E Street Northeast, Washington, D.C., DC, United States
Phone: 202 671-6010
Twitter: @mblovesbooks