This is a guest post from Ellie Michaelis, Library Media Specialist at Pinewood Elementary in Monticello. Find more mini grant reports here.

Through the aid of the CMLE minigrant, our school library was able to purchase 19 Spanish language books for our Spanish speaking students. 

This amount nearly doubled the size of the collection – we have increased our selection of books from 25 to 44. Though still small, we were able to purchase books that were of high interest to our students (such as Diario de Greg and Sonrie!)

Over the past years, our Spanish collection was neglected, because there was almost no demand for these books.  Recently, we have had an influx of new-to-country students who absolutely love the library.

They quickly devoured the small selection of books we had available and were asking for more, something we were glad to provide!  Our students provided input on the titles purchased with suggestions including Scooby Doo and “more big books”!

We also took input from the teachers, who suggested popular class read-alouds (Charlie y la fábrica de chocolate) and book study genres (biographies and fairy tales).

When our students heard that we had received the books, they were ecstatic and couldn’t wait for them to hit the shelves.  The joy of putting the right book in a child’s hand never gets old!