Tag Archives: CMLE service

Guest Blogger, School Media Specialist

CMLE Mini Grant: Spanish Books for Collection

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!

CMLE, Communication

Upcoming Wednesday Office Hours

 


Next CMLE Office Hours: July 26th and August 2nd, both from 11am – 1pm!

Location:
CMLE Headquarters
570 1st Street SE 
St. Cloud, MN 56307

 

What are CMLE Office Hours?

Well, in a recent poll, many people said they would appreciate having a time to just casually drop in to Headquarters to chat about library stuff.

So we have established a CMLE Office Hour for you!

Every Wednesday afternoon with an even numbered date, we’ll be here in the office from 11:00 to 1:00, and available for you to visit! (And not only will Mary and Angie be available to chat, Lady Grey may make an appearance as well! She usually has some excellent ideas to contribute! 🙂 )

You can feel free to stop in, with no appointment necessary.  Feel free to come talk about library programs, policies and procedures, ask questions, talk about cool things you are doing, or any other library-type stuff! We are available to you.

Come chat about writing policies, working through materials selections, negotiating with vendors, planning your website or social media, going to conferences as a presenter or an attendee, zines/manga/pop culture coolness, or anything else you want to discuss!

Want to talk about library things, but can’t make it in to the office? Let us know and we can set up a phone call or a chat session instead!

Would you like to just come say hi for a minute, and put a face to our names? Do it!

You can test out the bike desks, see the plants and ever-changing seasonal decorations, and check in on Orville The Official Office Bear! (Really, he’s the heart of the whole operation; so you don’t want to miss out on that!)

See you at Headquarters!

CMLE, Communication

Special Visitor for CMLE Office Hours

Today is our first day of CMLE Office Hours!

Every Wednesday afternoon with an even numbered date, we’ll be here in the office from 11:00 to 1:00, and available for you to visit!

And since this is the very first Wednesday we are holding Office Hours, we have a special visitor: Lady Grey!

Feel free to drop in today between 11:00 and 1:00 to talk about library programs, policies and procedures, ask questions, talk about cool things you are doing, or any other library-type stuff. And you can hang out with Lady Grey or try out our bike desk, if you’d like!

If you can’t make it in, give us a call or email, and we will be happy to help you.

CMLE, Conference, Guest Blogger

CMLE Scholarship Recipients from FY17!

We are happy to celebrate the recipients of CMLE Scholarships from Fiscal Year 2017! We are so glad they took advantage of our scholarship program in order to attend several different conferences, which you can read about from the links below.

If you are planning on doing some professional development next year by attending conferences or taking part in continuing education, we invite you to apply for a CMLE Scholarship! More information can be found here. If you are looking for some Continuing Education opportunities, make sure to check out our Google Calendar.

Read about our CMLE Scholarship recipients from Fiscal Year 2017 below:

As we near the end of this fiscal year, we encourage you to think ahead to Continuing Education opportunities for next year, and to keep CMLE scholarships in mind to help with the financial aspect of your professional growth!

CMLE, Communication

Our final Season One podcast: Information Literacy!

It has been so much fun to make these podcasts!

First, we had to figure out how to actually make a podcast. This was surprisingly tricky! There was no one single set of directions that told us everything we needed; so we spent time improvising, trying things, and learning from our failures. Learning new skills is a constant part of the profession, and it was (luckily!) always more exciting than frustrating to figure this stuff out.

We developed our own areas of specialization: Angie became the Chief Sound Engineer, in charge of figuring out all the technology; Mary provided the library content. Our assorted guest hosts provided energy and subject-matter expertise. It grew and built, and things got better as we went along.

And now we come to the end of Season One! Our final episode this season looks at a topic all libraries need to address with their patrons: Information Literacy.

You can find that podcast, and all of the others, on our podcast page. Or you can subscribe to us using iTunes, Stitcher, Pocket Casts, or any other podcast app you like.

Is this the end of the Linking Our Libraries podcast? Heck no!

Thursday, June 29 we will drop our bonus episode of Season One: The LOL Award Show. You can vote here for awards in an assortment of categories. Don’t like the categories? There is space for you to add in your own award! (Feel free to choose a winner too!) We will announce these on our podcast, so get out there and get going!

We are already planning out Season Two! Our first episode will drop Thursday August 10, focusing on Community Engagement. We look forward to all kinds of podcast excitement as we work through fifteen more topics of importance to our libraries!