Top 10 Reasons
to visit the Autrey Mill MS Learning Commons in 2019!
Let's make 2019 the best year yet!
- traveled to 5 continents, 6 countries, and over 50,000 miles to participate in 8 author visits and 24 Skype collaborations!
- collaborated on research projects, BreakoutEDU lessons, reading programs, STEM challenges, dove head first into our MakerSpace challenges in the Innovation Station, and more.
- celebrated Banned Books Week with over 800 students to teach students about our freedom to read and think critically about what they read.
- participated in the Hour of Code with coding challenge stations and Skyping with coding experts from Minecraft, Kindle eBooks, Pixar, and more each day.
- hosted a Stranger Things themed Book Fair that ended in over 1,000 students walking away with a brand new book and gifted books to 17 students who could not afford a new book.
- added 500 new physical books and 400 new ebooks/audiobooks to our collection!
- genrefied our fiction selections to help motivate our reluctant readers and expose students to different types of reading materials.
- encouraged our students to participate in the 40 Book Challenge.
- hosted reading clubs during lunch for 90 students each week.
Check out the top 10 reasons you should visit the Autrey Mill Middle School Learning Commons and to work with your library media specialist in 2019. Our goal is to help enhance what you're doing in the classroom and help students become empowered learners and creators. Bring your students and let's have an awesome year!
Reason #10: School Library Website
We also try to keep our blog updated with the awesome lessons, challenges, and projects that go on in the learning commons. Students already have the AMMS Library website bookmarked on their iPads so they have access to it whenever they have WiFi.
Reason #9: ebooks
Reason #8: Our MakerSpace
We also have an online MakerSpace you can access from the classroom on iPads or desktops. Visit it here:
Reason #7: Instructional Partnerships
Reason #6: Research & Digital Literacy Skills
Reason #5: Bloxels
Reason #4: Professional Development
Reason #3: Virtual Field Trips and Mystery Skypes
Reason #2: Author Visits and Literary Connections
We will also have a therapy dog visit every two weeks to work with some of our lower quadrant students and ELL students in reading.
I am also working to build a group of students to go read to our local elementary schools for Read Across America on March 1st.
Reason #1: Reading
THE BOOKS, of course!!! The primary purpose of the library STILL remains THE BOOKS! All of our books are now genrefied and we've added over 900 new books this school year already!
If you haven't read Donalyn Miller's The Book Whisperer yet, do yourself a favor and read it. Here are a couple of important quotes from The Book Whisperer:
“Readers are made, not born. Few students spring out of the ground fully formed as readers. They need help, and we cannot assume that they will get it from home, but they should always get it from us, their teachers.”
“By middle school, students have an image of themselves as readers or nonreaders. Students who do not read see reading as a talent that they do not have rather than as an attainable skill.”
"Students will read if we give them the books, the time, and the enthusiastic encouragement to do so. If we make them wait for the one unit a year in which they are allowed to choose their own books and become readers, they may never read at all. To keep our students reading, we have to let them."
Martha Bongiorno, library media specialist
This is my first year at AMMS and my ninth in education. My husband and I have two spunky children, Izzy (8) and Aris (3). Our family can often be found outside hiking or fostering a love of all things nerdy in our children by adventuring to historical places, festivals, or DragonCon. Before coming to AMMS, my focus was in designing and integrating STEAM education into social studies and language arts and laying the ground work for the first STEM program at Arthur Williams Middle School in Jesup, Georgia before experimenting as an elementary librarian for two years. I firmly believe the library is the center of the school in which knowledge and understanding is constructed from not just books, but from each other and asking questions. When you visit the library, you will often hear classical Led Zeppelin playing and rarely will you find me "shhhing" students in our library. I am available to collaborate on projects and lessons, find resources, research, find the perfect book, and lend a hand or two to fix the random tech issues which arise when we least want them to.
I hold a Bachelor of Science in Middle Grades Education, a Master of Science in Learning, Design, and Technology from the University of Georgia, and my Ed.S. in Instructional Technology from the University of Georgia.
Email: bongiornom@fultonschools.org
Website: http://discoveringtheremarkable.com
Twitter: @Mrs_Bongi