Mark your calendar! The OCPS Parent Academy has 11 exciting district-wide events planned for the upcoming school year.

Welcome back to another wonderful year at Lake Nona Middle School! I am excited to be starting another year here as your media specialist. Throughout the year I will be giving you weekly updates on the events, accomplishments, and general information about your media center. 

~ Sharon Powers, Media Specialist

Summer Reading Challenge Standing
One of those events is the participation in the Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge. We are certainly rocking it!  We are currently 9th overall with a total of 166,302 logged minutes!  That is incredible, but I know we can do better.  We are the number 1 school in Orange County. And in Florida we are in a close race with a school down south, but we are currently ranked above them. However, schools up north are returning too so we do not want to get too comfortable. Students - continue logging those minutes so we can win another record for our school. We have until 3:00 pm on September 9th. All students will be visiting the media center in the coming weeks to log their minutes if they were unable to over the summer.

Book Club
Another continuing part of the media center program is the Book Club. Students in this club read the SSYRA (Sunshine State Young Readers Award) books and participate in a county-wide competition later in the year. In several weeks we will determine a meeting date and time and start weekly meetings to discuss the books and make a plan so we can finish strong and win another title and trophy for the Lake Nona Knights. During the second week of school students can fill out an interest form in the cafeteria during Club Rush. Once I review the forms, I will notify students as to the specific meeting day during the week.  

What did you read this summer? I read several of the SSYRA books and I will share reviews of  a few of them for you in the coming weeks. One of my favorites was:

This is the first book in the Embassy Row series by Ally Carter.  

Grace Blakely is absolutely certain of three things:
1. She is not crazy.
2. Her mother was murdered.
3. Someday she is going to find the killer and make him pay.

As certain as Grace is about these facts, nobody else believes her - so there's no one she can completely trust. Not her grandfather, a powerful ambassador. Not her new friends, who all live on Embassy Row. Not Alexei, the Russian boy next door, who is keeping his eye on Grace for reasons she neither likes nor understands.

Everybody wants Grace to put on a pretty dress and a pretty smile, blocking out all her unpretty thoughts. But they can't control Grace - no more than Grace can control what she knows or what she needs to do. Her past has come back to hurt her . . . and if she doesn't stop it, Grace isn't the only one who will get hurt. Because on Embassy Row, the countries of the world stand like dominoes, and one wrong move can make them all fall down.