Week of September 3: Bloxels, Connections, Football

This week was a fast week, with no school Monday or Tuesday. After all the excitement last week, this week was a little less crazy. A little...

Our AK students listened to a story about football on Friday called Fall Ball. Many of them were excited for the Iowa/Iowa State game this weekend.

Kindergarteners listened to a book called Puppy!. It is a cute story about a cave boy who finds a "puppy" and brings him home.

First graders listened to two stories, both about imaginary friends, and practiced making to text-to-text connections about them. 

 

Second graders learned about all of the different genres that we use to classify books. We also talked about genres are used to classify movies and music. We are working towards using the library catalog to find books. Laying the foundation for our genres is important to knowing how our library works. 

Third graders practiced searching for library books according to Lexile. This will help them find a good fit book to have in their classroom during read-to-self time. Here's a quick video I made last year to teach them how to do it!



Finally, our 4th grade students started working with Bloxels. Their current skill focus is on characters, settings, and events, so each class read a short picture book and we are going to turn those books into video games. In the video game, the character will have to move through the setting and happen upon the events in the book. It isn't going to be a perfect science, because finding the perfect book was hard, but I think it'll be a fun way to reinforce the skill. Here are the books we read:

  

 

This week, we focused primarily on the main character. The students watch a quick video tutorial I made, and then built their character in Bloxels. (PS, did you know you can record your iPad screen using QuickTime on your Mac?! Mind=blown!)