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Losoya Middle School

LOSOYA 7 TH ANNUAL
CARDINAL TREE

Losoya celebrates its 7th Annual Cardi-
nal Tree, set up by Jessica Maldonado.
Mrs. Maldonado is our social work-
er and every year she makes sure that
students at Losoya will have something
special for Christmas. Staff and Teach-
ers at Losoya draw cardinal ornaments
from our Teacher Lounge Christmas
Tree to provide a special gift to one of
our very own students. The gift giving
will take place in the form of a Holi-
day Party before we go out for Winter
Break. It is something our kiddos look
forward to.
Counselor Jessica Maldonado and SISD Police Officer help pass out gifts.

READING MANIA AT LOSOYA

Losoya Middle School has caught the reading bug. It took a little while for everyone
to understand what exactly Accelerated Reader and MyOn were, but by November
every student and teacher on our campus was onboard and in fierce competition
with Matthey Middle School. In October we lost the competition to Matthey by
a few hundred AR points. That simply fired up our teachers and students to take
November by storm. Everyone reads here, everyday! We are simply establishing a
culture of reading.

Mrs. Laura Zarsky, our librarian of 13 years, is no stranger to Accelerated Reader.
She used it when she taught reading in middle school 27 years ago and designed
Losoya’s competitions when she first arrived at Losoya as a new librarian. So, work-
ing with teachers and helping teachers understand how AR works was no learning
Losoya students reading curve. “Even though the system has added some bells and whistles, the bones are the
in state of the art library. same,” says Mrs. Zarsky.

What has really helped our students take the reading lead this month is our ELAR department. They are committed to getting our
students to read, which has been a bit of a challenge without library books. Being Resourceful has been the name of the game. This
year we have relied on MyOn, an amazing digital library with over 7,000 titles. We have also used Bexar Bibliotech - an all digital
county library. We have always been partners with Bibliotech and every year Losoya hosts a card drive and orientation so students
can see all the amazing e-books and audiobooks they have to offer. Just recently Southside added SORA Overdrive, which students
can access through CLEVER, our single sign on. SORA offers a collection of Universal Simultaneous book checkouts for over 400
books, which means every student in the whole school could read the same book at one time. It also allows students to access age
appropriate books through our San Antonio Public Library. SORA allows all books to be downloaded to student devices so that no
Wifi is needed at home to read.

Our goal at Losoya is to read and keep our lead throughout the year. Reading is the key to doing well in every academic subject and
if our kiddos can read then we are going to score great on STAAR.

10 www.southsideisd.org