Welcome to Our Library!

Welcome to the Maie Ellis Library! My name is Mrs. Draves and I am the school library technician.

As the head library ninja, my goal is to teach your children to use the library not only for academic purposes, but perhaps more importantly, to help instill in them a lifelong love of reading. Here at Maie Ellis, a visit to the library isn’t always just about story time: Library lessons teach our students about proper book care, use of the Dewey Decimal System, how to choose an appropriate book for their reading level and how to use our online catalog.

To help instill that all-important love of reading, we strive to stock a selection of the newest books on the market. Students also participate in special events such as library scavenger hunts; “quiz shows” via the Kahoot app are thrown in for good measure. We celebrate annual events such as International Dot Day in September www.thedotclub.org/dotday/ to help our students make their mark on the world, as well as National Poetry Month in April https://www.poets.org/national-poetry-month/home. Our students also love voting for the annual California Young Reader Medal http://www.californiayoungreadermedal.org/ each year. For our older students who want to learn even more about books and our library, we offer a Library Leader Club, which meets monthly. [CLUB PAGE]

Other highlights of our library include:

• Our library is home to more than 13,000 volumes. Approximately 40 percent of those are Spanish titles.
• We celebrate “The Leader in Me” with our leader of the month bulletin board. We also feature a “habit of the month” book section.
• We hold two book fairs each year, one in the fall and the other in spring. Funds raised from the book fairs are used to buy new books for our library.
• Each year our local Rotary Club visits our library, where Rotarians read to our third graders and give them each a book.
• Several times each year we have story time in which our older students read to their classmates in both English and Spanish.
  
• One of our most popular programs is Accelerated Reader (AR). A bulletin board in the library tracks points earned by students, which helps to motivate them with a healthy sense of competition.

Stop in and say hello sometime!

Kathleen Draves,
Head Library Ninja, Maie Ellis Elementary
kdraves@fuesd.org
760-695-9641