Senior Picks
Attention Rising Seniors:
Your Senior Pick books have been assigned. The link is on the Rising 12th Grade page. If you filled out the form, you probably got your first choice. If you didn't bother to select, your book was chosen for you. And your name appears in red. Enjoy!
Last question of the year:
What are your summer plans (other than doing your summer reading!)?
Summer Reading Links are now up
We can feel how excited you are about this! If you are going to be in the Middle School next year – that's all of you rising 6th, 7th and 8th graders – you can find your summer reading requirements by clicking on the Reading Lists tab above. Once that page opens, you will see the link that says MS Summer Reading. That's for you – go ahead and click!
If you are – or are going to be – an Upper School student next year, you will hover on the Reading Lists tab and then drop down to Upper School Summer Reading 2012. From that point, you can either open that page or choose one of the grades from the next list that appears to see what you are required to read over the summer. As was mentioned in this week's assembly, any History and English assignments you might have are also on those pages.
Rising Juniors – remember to choose your two American Studies books from the lists on your page. Deadline – May 4th.
Rising Seniors – remember to choose your Senior Pick titles from the link on your page. Deadline – May 4th.
And finally, the question of the week: Which summer blockbuster are you most excited to see? So far we have Batman on the board – anybody else?
Opening days
Spring is here (and pollen!) and that means it is baseball season. Which will last until it's almost winter, but that is another story. So in honor of opening day and those boys of summer, we're asking this question of the week:
The Braves – will they go all the way or will they break your heart? Who will win the World Series?
Now, since we are still a library that has books on paper, we will show you a few that might be of interest to you baseball fans. We've even put them on display, if you want to check them out!
The Atlanta Braves by John Grabowski. How could we not give space to the hometown team?
The Crackers: early days of Atlanta baseball by Tim Darnell. More about the local teams.
Baseball: an illustrated history by Geoffrey Ward. This was also a PBS series by Ken Burns.
Baseball: a literary anthology edited by Nicholas Dawidoff. A huge collection of writing – fiction, non-fiction, poetry – about the sport.
At the crack of the bat: baseball poems compiled by Lillian Morrison and illustrated by Steve Cieslawski. Poems and more poems about baseball and those who play it.
Baseball great by Tim Green. A fast-paced story about steroid use in baseball by the former Atlanta Falcon.
Chipper Jones by Bill Zack. A biography of one of Atlanta's stars.
The cultural encyclopedia of baseball byJonathan Fraser Light. All kinds of information, from anecdotes to quotes and more.
Quick Pick…no, not the lottery!
Before you hop away on break, we have a question of the week for you:
When it comes to Easter candy, do you prefer chocolate bunnies or jelly beans?
Have a great break!
Hungry for more?
First, the question of the week on our whiteboard wall:
The Hunger Games:
Movie. Book. Discuss!
And back to our normal post. So how many of you have read The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins? Would you like to read something else that's kind of like it? We've read a lot of them, so we'll try to recommend the books we think you'll like. Or link to lists online that include the best ones. There's a wide range of novels like The Hunger Games (the genre is "dystopias"). There's the classic Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. It's been around a long time, and is still one of the best. Then you have Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow, which some of you may have read – it was once a summer reading book. What they all have in common is that the world as we know it has changed. And not for the better. There is usually some cataclysmic event that wipes out the population, or the government overreacts to, or some other depressing reason that the world is in a bad way. There are always at least two groups; one is the government or the group "in charge" and they are almost always authoritarian with many laws that restrict their people. The other group is the opposition. They see things differently and don't agree with the current regime and actively fight against it. Below are several lists featuring dystopian novels. Our own catalog features a book river and a showcase with all the dystopian titles that the VWL owns. We hope you find lots of great books to read and that you let us know if you read ones that are not on our lists!
If you liked Hunger Games – Platteville Public Library
Robert Collins' top 10 dystopian novels
Work and Play
Over Spring Break, we made a couple of changes in the library. Nothing major, and nothing obvious. But the changes were for you, so we want to tell you about them!
Work first: The two small study rooms upstairs now have lcd flat screen monitors on the walls, as well as the whiteboards. Why? Because we hope you will use them when you are working on projects or homework together. For example, if some of you are doing a WebAssign, and you can work together, one person could connect to the monitor and everyone could see the problem. No more clumping around one computer! Right now, the rooms are just open for use. If they become popular (and we hope they will!), we'll let you schedule your times.
Play time: The second change is for fun. The end of one of our shelves – close to the old tables - was covered with IdeaPaint, the whiteboard stuff.
So we are going to pose a question of the week on the wall, and you will have your say. The first question?
Who Will Win the NCAA Championship?
YALE BASKETBALL TEAM, 1901. – Contemporary Photograph.. Fine Art. Encyclopædia Britannica Image Quest. Web. 14 Mar 2012.
Check out our ebooks — really!
We are very pleased to announce our initial collection of ebooks that you can check out to your own devices! You'll need an app called Blio to download them, but it's free. You can find it here or from iTunes. It will work on any PC, Android or iOS device (not on a mac laptop yet, but it's coming).
You can see what we have by going to this page or looking in our catalog for ebooks. We'll also have a link to all of our ebook collections – the kind you can just open and the kind you can check out – on our database page soon.
We're starting small, but if there is something you want, let us know and we'll put it on the wishlist. We expect that most of the ebooks you access this way will be fiction, just because of the nature of the process. After all, if you are working on a research paper, you probably don't want your material to disappear after a couple of weeks! Based on previous experience, you tend to hold on to your books for your papers for about three months!
Take a look – if you want to try it, you'll need Blio on your device, a quick tour of the program, and your login information (get that from a librarian).
Season’s Readings!
It's getting close to our favorite time of year – vacation! And lots of time for reading. So we asked your teachers what they were planning to read over the break. Some of the answers might surprise you —- or maybe not.
Here's what they said….and if you'd like to add your plans to the list, just let us know!
The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins - Ms. Bradburn (US)
Blue Nights by Joan Didion – Mrs. Frazier (MS)
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami – Mr. Parker (US/MS)
Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell – Mr. Nichols (US) — after he reads your exams! Then he'll finish the Hunger Games series.
Kill Alex Cross and Merry Christmas, Alex Cross by James Patterson, Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, Little Bee by Chris Cleave and Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay – Ms. Peaks (MS)
Outcasts United by Warren St. John – Mrs. Amabile (LS)
The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise by Julia Stuart – Mrs. Milanovic, looking for insight into British humour.
Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt – Mr. Rau and Ms. Fetters (both US) — Ms. Fetters also wants to read The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes and Stephen King's new book, 11/22/63.
Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt and Monsoon: the Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power by Robert Kaplan – Mrs. Holscher (US)
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell and Swamplandia by Karen Russell – Ms. Franks (US)
Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness – Mrs. Nelson (LS) — and she plans to read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens to her daughter, just as her mom read it to her every year.
Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff, At Home by Bill Bryson, and Condoleezza Rice: A Memoir of My Extraordinary, Ordinary Family and Me by Condoleeza Rice– Ms. Longardt (LS)
The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore – Ms. Moss (US)
Zone One by Colson Whitehead (zombies in New York City!), 11/22/63 by Stephen King and lots of potential summer reading titles! – Mrs. Martin (US)
The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater (because I loved her Shiver trilogy), The Empire of Gut and Bone by M.T. Anderson (because it's the 3rd in the Norumbegan Quartet and I LOVE M.T. Anderson!), Web of Air by Philip Reeve (because Fever Crumb was excellent and Steampunk is one of my favorite things ever) and finally, Tunnel Vision by Susan Shaw (because her book Black-eye'd Suzie was incredibly well done) – Ms. Knott (MS)
Boy Reads Book Next To Christmas Tree. Photography. Encyclopædia Britannica Image Quest. Web. 30 Nov 2011. http://quest.eb.com/media/image.htm?mediaId=131_1873225
Nooks for books.
Okay, we admit it. That is a corny title for this post. But it's true. Thanks to the generosity of the Lovett Parents' Association and our 2011 Nancy Fraser Parker award winners (Robert Currie and Caroline Szyperski), the libray now has nooks for you to borrow. We have three for Middle School students and 3 for Upper School students. They all come preloaded with some books, but we are ready to add more – if you want them. So here's where you get to help:
Tell us what you want. Fiction, non-fiction. Biography. Fantasy. Romance. Classics. It's up to you. You can stop by and tell us or you can email the librarians. Be sure to include your name and your grade so we put the book on the right nooks.
Are you interested? Then let us hear from you!
Image source: http://ebookreader.org/nook-simple-touch-review.php
We’ve gone mobile! (again.)
The library's catalog is now an iPhone, iPad and Droid app! We know – just what you always wanted! You're so excited, you can barely stand it. So, here is the link to the instructions: VWL app or you can click on this button:
Think how handy this could be – next time you are in the library looking for a book on your topic, you can just open your personal mobile device (as long as it is not between 8 am and 3 pm!) and type in your topic and presto! You'll see what the library has on your subject. Isn't technology amazing? Oh – when you download the app, you have to select our library. We're listed as The Lovett School. Yes, it is under The. Sorry – that was out of our control.
And if you are really into doing research on your smartphone, be sure to download the Gale MyLibrary app and the Ebsco Mobile app, too. Those will give you access to our ereference and periodical/journal databases. There was a post about that last November – and it has almost the same title.
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