Buying New Books & Stuff

i know, i know....i haven't blogged lately... we've been busy with our annual book and equipment order! every year when we buy new books we put out a notice to all of our teachers....asking "what do you want?" we also...and this is the most important!! ask the kids "what do you want?" our suggestion bus on the circulation desk gets full of student requests...also, when any kid asks for a book and we don't have it... i immediatley check to see if any *other* HCPSS middle school has it and if they do...we add that to the list! in case you're wondering, we place the following list as priority for purchasing:

1. kids requests (they are our #1 customers!)
   
2. teacher requests (we want them to have what they want & need for instruction)
   
3. best of the year lists (a good place to start!)
   
4. award winning books (always good to have those award winners!)
   
5. GT book club books (always a great list of books!)
   
6. great reviews in School Library Journal (the latest and the best reviewed!)
   

Mrs. Black pours over all these and i add in my 2 cents then we look at the needs of our collection, filling in what we have weeded or where we see areas that need to be built up and we place our order! YAY!!!! then when the order comes in we see what we got! it's like a holiday in the Media Center!! we usually keep all the NEW books on a cart for students to get to them right away....i also invite the teachers over to see that what they asked for we have now! and anything we wanted that we didn't get goes into the file for next year! we love technology....we do!!!
but man..oh man...we still LOVE love love and so <3 our books!!!

we've also been busy buying for our school super cool new LCD projectors, document cameras, and other AV items that are an important part to our multi-media technology infused classroom. we wish we could get everything for every classroom!...if only we had the $$ for that, but we do the best that we can!
~Ms. Jones & Ms. Black