Book Club Book #4

Mepham's Book Club will meet in the library after school on Wednesday, March 23rd to discuss The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. All students are welcome to attend this book club. Snacks will be provided.

About The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything differently, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?

Interactive Images with Thinglink

Students used their knowledge of photography to create Bento Box inspired images using symbols and imagery from their favorite books. The results are some of the most beautiful book recommendations you could ask for.

Mepham High School Library student-teacher, Mrs. Hirsch, devised a lesson plan to use with Mrs. Desmond's Photography 4 students using Thinglink in conjunction with their Book Bento Boxes. What is Thinglink? Thinglink allows you to add text, images, links, and video to any image using tags. Students uploaded an image of their Book Bento Boxes to Thinglink and then created tags for the book and each artifact. Once they had their image uploaded they could change the layout and icons for each of the tags. Each student was required to write a book summary and/or review. They also had to tag each artifact with an explanation for why they selected it and how it is important to the story. When they were finished creating these interactive tabs, they were able to download a QR code and import it (along with their original photo) to our Book Bento Gallery Slideshow. Here are a few examples of how they turned out!

Students had an opportunity in class to present their interactive images. We then printed out all of these slides and displayed them around the library. Students from all grade levels can now scan the QR codes with their phones and be transported to Thinglink to learn more about these wonderful books.

Interactive Book Bento Boxes are on display in the Mepham High School Library. It might just inspire you to pick up a copy!

Book Tweets

Mr. Acthziger's 9th-grade classes created book tweets this week with library student teacher, Mrs. Hirsch. A book tweet is a short book summary or review written in tweet form. Students used hashtags to emphasize key phrases that hint at the story, and were required to include the book title and author’s name. It was a challenge to create the tweet in 280 characters or less, but Mrs. Hirsch provided the students with some great tips listed below.

Instructions were given to students

Keep it short:

• Avoid long words or extra words.
• Avoid unnecessary qualifiers.
• Ex: “really”, “basically”, “very”
• Use “&” instead of “and”.
• Replace a phrase with a word.
  Ex: “In the event that” can be replaced with “if”
• Use social media common abbreviations
  Ex: SMH (Shake My Head), IRL (In Real Life)
• Combine words to create a hashtag.
  Ex: #familysecret, #bookswithaconscience

Example from student teacher

Here are a few of the student's final products. 

 

Book Bento Boxes

Mrs. Desmond's College Photography class consisting of 11th and 12th-grade students came to the library this week to learn about Book Bento Boxes. It was part history lesson, part culture appreciation lesson, part English lesson, and part photography lesson. The students taught by library student teacher, Mrs. Hirsch, learned what a bento box is - a Japanese term for a single-serve takeaway meal that is served in a box, traditionally lacquered wood with separate sections for different portions. Applying this structure to a literature response strategy results in book bento boxes. Students selected a book that they have read in the past year and got to work brainstorming what objects they would include in their boxes. The requirements were: 5-7 physical objects that hold meaning or represent something from the book (no photos of objects); the photo had to be square, and students could be as creative as they wanted.

Mrs. Desmind went over flat lay photography. She discussed lighting, background, props, composition (symmetrical vs asymmetrical). This year students worked with DSLR cameras instead of cell phones. The photos above show students putting their book bento boxes together to be photographed.

Stay tuned for the final projects coming soon!

Author Margreit Maitland

Our annual author visit was back in person this year, but we had to move the venue to comfortably fit all our attendees in one place. In the auditorium on Tuesday, February 8th, over 190 students had the pleasure of meeting young adult author (and former Mepham parent - both her son and daughter attended Mepham), Margreit Maitland. She discussed her two novels, Runaway at Sea and Adventurer at Sea. Both were published by Red Penguin Books. She hopes to have the third book in the trilogy completed soon. 

Author Margreit Maitland with our book raffle winners.

About the author:

Writing has always been a dream, floating in the back of Margreit Maitland’s mind for as long as she can remember. A love for literature was instilled in her by her mother and family in general from an early age. While growing up, she read a wide range of books from the classics to something quick and fun and adored getting lost in a story. 

Since the publication of her first two novels, Margreit has launched a Creative Writing Workshop for children aged 10 and up for schools and libraries and is enjoying an opportunity to help students discover their potential and original ideas. 

Margreit Maitland is an enthusiastic supporter of literature, education, science, wildlife, and nature. The source of which lies in being encouraged to muck around in the mud searching for hermit crabs and other tiny or large inhabitants of the natural world. She enjoys living on Long Island, where she is happily surrounded by beaches with her two children and Mr. Frosty the cat. In her spare time, she can be found staying active and outside whenever possible and with her treasured family and friends. In the future, she looks forward to sharing many more stories.

Wordle

It took me six tries, but I finally got it. :)

Book Club Book #3

Mepham's Book Club will meet in the library after school on Wednesday, February 2nd to discuss Far From You by Tess Sharpe. All students are welcome to attend this book club. Snacks will be provided. Our next book club book will be selected by the students after our meeting concludes. 

About Far From You:

After Sophie Winters survives a brutal attack in which her best friend, Mina, is murdered, she sets out to find the killer. At the same time she must prove she is free of her past Oxy addiction and in no way to blame for Mina's death.