We are currently midway through our student library orientations. By the end of next week, all 1300+ students will be familiar with our library and its resources. It's been such a pleasure for us to meet LMS students, new and old!

This year, in an effort to encourage independent reading, we will be spying on Lancer Time classes on Tuesday afternoons to see if students are engaged in silent sustained reading. Classes that we "catch" reading will be awarded a sticker for the week. At the end of the marking period, the classes with the most stickers will have the opportunity to win a pizza party. Ms. Hedge and I are looking for some more parent volunteers to help us with this endeavor. If you are interested in volunteering in the library, please email Nicole Yakatan (nyakatan@aol.com), our volunteer coordinator. Nicole will be happy to add you to her distribution list for the SignUpGenius. We always have plenty of projects in the library!

We will be announcing the winners of the FCPS Book Your Summer contest by sometime next week. As a reminder, of the LMS students who participated in this county-wide contest, one lucky student will win a laptop and one student from each grade level will win $50 worth of books of their choice. The winners from each school will be randomly selected by FCPS library services. We look forward to congratulating the winners!

Students who participated in the Ravenous Readers challenge over the summer are being awarded small prizes in their English classes: snazzy bookmarks, VIP invitations to Literary Club and Battle of the Books (after-school activities that are sure to appeal to the literary-minded!), and passes to a special ice cream social that we are holding in the cafeteria next Friday during Lancer Time.

We are sponsoring a new club, Battle of the Books, that will be meeting on Thursday afternoons in the library. How to describe this club...? Quiz Bowl meets Literary Club! A club for students who love to read and discuss books and who don’t mind getting competitive! We’ll be reading this year’s Virginia Reader’s Choice books, and groups of students will compete against each other to see who knows the books the best. Our first meeting will be held after school on Thursday, September 22nd.