2018 was an amazing year! In just 5 months of the 2018-2019 school year we...

• 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.

This isn’t even all the amazing day to day, heart to heart activities, talks, learning experiences, and readers advisory that went on with our students and staff. I’m looking forward to an amazing 2019!!

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!

Did you know the AMMS Library has a website students can access 24/7 that houses our databases, links to resources, tips & tricks, reading suggestions, and more?! Our library's moto is "Discovering the Remarkable" because we believe libraries help you discover the remarkable things around you and within yourself. Find your remarkable online, too!

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.

Students can utilize their iPads to access our ebooks on OverDrive, MackinVIA, and Epic! which has access to over thousands of ebooks, audio books, read-with-me books, and informational videos. We have read 28,000 copies so far this year!

Have you heard of the MakerSpace movement in libraries and classrooms? It's about giving our students and staff access to a space and tools where they can make, create, explore, and learn. We have Legos, Snap Circuits, LittleBits, MakeyMakey, 3D printing software, and more. Students can use these materials on their own before school, during lunch, for school-related projects, or we can plan a literary lesson around them!

We also have an online MakerSpace you can access from the classroom on iPads or desktops. Visit it here:

Collaborative lessons are a great way for us to team up to teach information literacy skills, brainstorm and create an engaging project, or for me to help curate resources for your classroom. We have so many resources like Gale research databases, MackinVIA, OverDrive, Epic!, and apps like Book Creator (make your own ebooks that can be downloaded as PDFs) or I can make a HyperDoc or Destiny Collection with resources for your unit. We can partner on book projects, using the library space, or bringing in guest speakers too!

Googling has made our lives easy, but there is an important difference between Googling an answer and understanding the why. While most students understand how to use a search engine, it is up to us to help our students with the necessary skills to take answers to the next level. That's where our research and digital literacy skills come into our lives! We should teach our students how to evaluate and question sources, draw conclusions, spot fake news, and push students to new levels of creativity. In partnering with us, you can also help teach digital citizenship, mend a digital divide with our lower economic status students, and work on providing a personalized, differentiated approach to learning.

Bloxels is not just another tech-enabled toy. It's a hands-on, brains-on, creativity and technology experience. Bloxels uniquely unlocks students’ innate creativity by leveraging something they love: video games. Students can play fun games and channel their creative potential as they gain greater understanding of important topics like design logic, and computer science and demonstrate their knowledge of history, science and mathematics and more through the games they create. Let's work together to help students create video games to share what they've learned in your classroom!

Do you want to know about resources I've purchased for the library and your classrooms? Do you want to learn more about G Suite for Education like Google Classroom, Google Docs, Google Slides, or Hyperdocs? Have you heard about Flipgrid and want to incorporate it more into your classroom? I will be hosting Bagels, Books and Bytes this semester - a 15 minute tidbit session on tech tools that can enhance your teaching. You can also always email, drop by, text, Facebook, Tweet, or send a pigeon and I'll help in any way I can! Some of my expertise areas: I'm Level 2 Google Certified, a Flipgrid Certified Ambassador, a Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert, and enjoy gamification.

Would you like to connect what your students are learning in the classroom to a real world event, connect with an expert, connect with another classroom around the world, or involve critical thinking and social studies skills into your lessons? Try one of our virtual field trips or a Mystery Skype!

Becky Albertalli will be visiting our school on February 1st in honor of World Read Aloud Day! For World Ready Aloud Day: If you would like to schedule an author visit for your classes, I can try to schedule one for each class period or find a coordinating classroom who would like to talk about a book you are reading in class.

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.

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."

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