W
e all have that one teacher or one school experience that will stick with us forever. As the librarian at Gatesville Elementary, my goal is to help our students make as many of those memories as possible! A few years ago, I had a crazy idea for a “library transformation” that would allow me to transform our library space to create a fun and memorable hands-on learning experience for all of the students at Gatesville Elementary. I approached my campus principal, Keegan Webb, with this idea and she immediately said “YES! Let’s do it. How can I help?”. Three years later, we are planning our sixth Library Transformation and they just keep getting better and better! How does it work? We close the library down for three days and 30 classes of 1st, 2nd and 3rd graders rotate through for our transformation lessons. I lead the lessons and the classroom teacher assists me. I design and create these lessons from scratch using the Texas Essential Knowledge and Standards (TEKS), so they are purposefully aligned with what students are learning in the classroom. We rotate the subject area of each transformation. We started with reading, but we’ve also focused on math, phonics, social studies and science. We currently have a district wide push to enrich our students’ writing abilities, so we are incorporating writing opportunities as much as possible. I want students to feel like they are truly in a different space, so I go all out when it comes to setting up. We use large backdrops to section off part of the library where the activities will be happening. Sometimes I buy backdrops and sometimes I paint the back-
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drop on butcher paper depending on the theme. We cover the tables, add fun decorations and try to make it as much of an “immersive experience” as possible. Students also get a token/gift that they get to use and take home with them after each transformation. So what is the motivation behind these transformations? First of all, a large activity such as this can take time and money (that classroom teachers do not have). I set up the space and the materials are paid for by the school, so teachers are not paying anything out of pocket. By running it through one centralized location, it doesn’t disrupt the students' regular learning environment. They get to have a really fun activity for about 30 minutes, then the rest of their day goes on as normal. It takes a lot of stress away from the teachers being able to return to a normal classroom for the rest of the day! Past Transformations Surgical Transformation The surgical transformation focused around cutting something apart and putting it back together. Activities included a contraction surgery for first grade, where students took two words, cut out the unnecessary letters and reconnected the contraction with a bandaid and an apostrophe. Second grade students did a “character autopsy” where students identified internal and external traits of a character in a fiction story.
