Week of September 18

We kicked off this week with two #makermonday challenges. One with Ms. Howe's first graders, and one with Ms. Blake's kindergartners. The firsties read a book called If I Built a House by Chris Van Dusen and then used materials to build their own house.

The kindies have been learning nursery rhymes, so we read Humpty Dumpty and tried to build a wall that he could sit on without falling off. We used hard boiled eggs to test our walls. If he didn't stay, then kids made changes and tried again. 

This week our preschoolers listened to Oops, Pounce, Quick, Run and checked out a book.

The AK kids listened to Dot by Patricia Intriago. In the book, the dot takes many different forms. Students colored their own dot, which was actually designed for the book The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds. This dot is made by Quiver, which is an app that turns the dots into augmented reality dots. The kids had fun scanning their dots after drawing them!

Kindergartners listened to Monkey & Duck Quack Up by Jennifer Hamburg. In the book, the monkey is trying to get the duck to rhyme with him so that they can win the rhyming contest. However, duck just keeps quacking! 

First graders read Water is Water by Miranda Paul and used it to practice making text-to-self, text, and world connections. 

Second graders wrapped up beginning, middle, and end by reading Me Want Pet by Tammi Sauer. The kids really liked this cute story, probably because of the cave boy voice it uses. After reading, we sorted out the BME & characters and setting using our Promethean board. 

Third graders used the app Skitch on the iPads to annotate poems. They were looking for stanzas, rhymes, and repetitions. They worked with a partner or by themselves and selected a poem of their choice out of our selection of poetry books. 

Fourth graders continued reading The One & Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate. I haven't tackled reading a chapter book with an entire grade for a long time, but this one just seems important right now. First, the characters and setting are so clear in this book. Applegate does an amazing job of helping us get to know them. Fourth grade is currently working on character traits. I also think that this book yields a lot of empathy for the characters, because we get to know them so well. I wanted to infuse teaching story structure along with empathy, and this book is the perfect one. So far, kids are very engaged. 

Here's our finished Ivan display in the hallway. Our library volunteer did an amazing job putting it together! There are facts about the real Ivan displayed around him. Hopefully we will be adding a few things this week!

School Has Started!

The start of school arrived on August 23, and library classes started the following week. We've been keeping busy, of course! We've checked out over 5,300 books to our staff and students in the first 3 weeks! Whew!

Our preschoolers & AK kids started coming to the library last week. We've read Little Green Peas and Oops, Pounce, Quick, Run so far. These kids love coming to the library and they started checking out books right away! Preschoolers will start out with one book for a couple of months, and AK starts out with two books.

Kindergarteners started out the year by listening to A Perfectly Messed Up Story. This book is a fun way to teach kids about how to take care of books. They also started checking out two books! This past week, we started reading some nursery rhymes. We read the nursery rhymes in comic book format! After reading Little Miss Muffett, Humpty Dumpty, and London Bridge, we watched a quick video of London Bridge. Then, we looked at real images of London Bridge. Finally, the kids used different materials to try to build bridges before checking out books.

First graders also started out the year with A Perfectly Messed Up Story. Then, we moved into making connections. We practiced text-to-self connections using David Goes to School and text-to-text connections with The Little Red Hen & That Is Not a Good Idea. For the text-to-self connections, we used Seesaw to record our connections.

 

Second graders began the year by talking about fiction genres. We watched a couple of videos and talked about the different genres. Students completed a Kahoot about 4 genres, and worked in groups to tell us about how a book fit into a genre.

This past week, second graders listened to Where the Wild Things Are and drew/wrote about the beginning, middle, and end of the story. This story was perfect for BME, because the settings change so much, which makes it pretty easy to determine! 

Third graders spent the first two weeks practicing how to use the library. The first week, I created augmented reality tasks that kids were able to complete using iPads and the Metaverse app. This looks kind of like PokemonGo, where the augmented reality is layered on top of your surroundings using your camera. However, instead of Pokemon, my Bitmoji gave students the tasks! Creating these was super fun and pretty easy. The coding is very much like a storyboard, and different blocks and buttons can do different things. I am excited to learn more about this app, and teach it to teens at a local coding workshop! 

This is the code for one of the tasks--like I said, pretty easy!

Third graders also picked out a subject of interest to them, and had to find a picture book, a non-fiction book, and a fiction chapter book about that subject using our online catalog. Then, we took pictures in front of the green screen with the books!

This past week, third graders looked at a couple of poems. We discussed stanzas, rhyming words, and repeated words, and why the author chooses to use those things. Students went up to the board to highlight, circle, and explain their thinking!

Fourth graders spent the first two weeks during library learning how to use Biblionasium to track their reading. We purchased Biblionasium as a school-wide system this year. So far, fourth graders have gotten really good at using it. I'll start working with the younger grades soon as a way to track their at-home reading minutes. 

This past week, we started reading The One & Only Ivan. It is a book that I believe every kid should read/hear before they leave elementary school. This week, we read the first 20 pages and talked about character traits of Ivan. We tracked a few things using a Flipchart, but if anyone else has a great idea about tracking text evidence for character traits, I'd love to hear it! My volunteer also made a really cool hallway display about Ivan, but I forgot to take a picture of it! I'll share it next week!