Memoirs of an Elf

It was the week before Christmas and all in the school, hardly a teacher was keeping their cool...

So in the library this week we have been having some fun with the book Memoirs of an Elf by Devin Scillian.  I found that Epic!  had the book available on their awesome website, so I have been sharing it on the Promethean board so the kids can see the wonderful pictures up close.

After we read the book, we have been having more fun by taking our own "elfies" with the app X-mas Selfie which is free on the app store.  Kindergarten and 1st grade thought it was so much fun!

National Computer Science Week!

My kindergarten and first graders are excited to be celebrating National Computer Science Week this week!  We are reading Doug Unplugged by Dan Yaccarino, another of the SC Picture Book Award Nominees this year.  Doug is a robot who is learning new things, which leads us into talking about how computers and robots work and are programmed.

After reading our book, the students are getting a taste of computer programming through the code.org website. We don't have time to do a whole hour of code, but the students are really enjoying getting a taste of it and then I am sending home the website so they can impress their parents with their coding skills.

Wordless Books

This week in the library I have been sharing a new favorite of mine - Journey by Aaron Becker with my kindergarten and first grade students.

I fell in love with this book last year when we were considering it for the SC Picture Book Award nominees for this year.  I have to admit that I hadn't ever used a wordless book for a read aloud in the library although I had teachers at a previous school I worked at who loved using them.  My daughter is a student member of the Book Award Committee and as we were reading all 200 of the nominees for the list, this was the book we had to read at least 20 times.

The wonderful thing about wordless books is that every time you read it you add different details and use different words to describe what is happening in the pictures.  I would read it to my daughter and she would read it back to me in her words.

My kindergarten and first grade students are loving this book.  They think it is hilarious when I ask them what is different about the book and show them a few pages until they realize it has no words.  I like to then close the book and say "well, how are we supposed to read it if it has no words?!?" and we talk about how the illustrations tell the story and we can describe (be the author) and use our own words!

I also absolutely love the story told in the book.  It is all about imagination and what you can do with just a piece of chalk.  The students are on the edge of their seats as the action in the book unfolds and they clap and cheer at the ending.

Book Character Parade!

My husband thinks I might have a slight addiction to Pinterest, but I found a wonderful idea by Cathy Knutson at Oak Hills Elementary Media Center that she shared on her blog  http://ohekidstech.blogspot.com/  that I am using on this short 2 day week in my library!  We are reading the book Balloons Over Broadway: The True Story of the Puppeteer of Macy's Parade by Melissa Sweet and then creating our own book character balloons with the ipads using the free app Doodle Buddy.  Cathy said she used YouDoodle, but I absolutely love how easy Doodle Buddy is to use.

After reading the book and pausing to talk about all of the wonderful teachable moments (like marionettes are a fancy word for puppets, what are immigrants, and how do ideas grow from something small to something so large) the students gathered at the tables to create their own book character floats. 

Author Visit

We were excited to welcome author J. Scott Savage to Bethel Elementary this week!  Back in May I got an email from his publisher saying he would be on tour this fall and asking if any schools in Greenville, SC would be interested in having him visit for free before his book signing at Barnes and Noble.  I jumped on it because I LOVE free author visits and the blurb about his presentation said he would be talking about creativity and how to come up with a story idea in less than 5 minutes using a hero, goal, obstacles, and consequences.  Our school theme this year is superheroes and it just fit so perfectly!

I am so glad we had him come visit!  He was great with my 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders, very fun to listen to!  He shared about what it is like to be an author, showed his new book trailer, and walked the students through creating a fun story!  I went by Barnes and Noble for the signing (in the cold rain!) and saw so many students from school that it was obvious he made a wonderful impression on them!

2nd Grade Centers

Second graders at Bethel have been hard at work learning about the library so they can start using the computers to look up books.  They thought they could just hop on a computer and google it, but we have done a lot of talking about how the library is organized into sections, how information can be found on the book and signs around the room, and how the library catalog Destiny Quest allows them to look up a book and find out where it should be.

I was so excited to start the year off with new signs that my awesome media clerk Mrs. Lynch created over the summer.  She used to work as a graphic artist and is so wonderful at creating things!  These signs really made everything brighter and more fun!

Every week for the past 5 weeks or so my second graders have had a read aloud from our SC Picture Book Awards and an activity to help them learn about the library.  We have done Mrs. Lodges Library Shelving Game for learning how to put Fiction and Nonfiction in order.  We have made our own book spines to practice finding the title and call number on the spine.  We have separated call numbers by section to practice recognizing the different areas.  We have even practiced looking up books on Destiny and finding the call number.

So this week we started with some library centers.  I was struggling with the need to keep some order to being able to help them go to the shelves and practice finding books.  I really didn't want to send all 25 students to the shelves at one time.  So I set back up each activity we had done previously at tables and broke them into groups so they can practice and I can take a small group at a time to help them find books on the shelves.  I even made mini check-lists so I can keep up with who has been at each center each week.

I am excited to see how this works.  So far it has gone well, and putting them in small groups has allowed everyone to practice the activity, where the first time did it they had to share ipads or materials.  Now we have moved from doing it together to completing it on their own before they get to start using the computers.

Explorer Instagrams

My fourth graders have just finished their unit on Explorers!  I saw this really fun post by Erin Klein on her blog (Here) about how she used "Instagram" to explore characters in a book she was reading with her students.  After talking with the fourth grade teachers, they agreed to let me take one of their computer lab times to work with the students on how to do an image search and copy and resize in Word, with a little copyright information thrown in (of course!).

Since the students were studying the explorers, their task was to look up something that would have been important to one of the explorers.  They brought their Social Studies notebooks to help them with ideas and we brainstormed a bit about items that would have been important (compass, ships, food, etc.) vs things they wouldn't have had (electronic devices!).

They had a lot of fun searching, resizing, and printing.  I used Mrs. Klein's Instagram template that she so graciously put on Teachers Pay Teachers.  Then the students got out the glue and scissors to get a little bit messy...  They also had to write a short sentence explaining why their picture would have been important to the explorer.  My favorites were the students who really got into the spirit of things and wrote from their explorer's point of view!

Overall, it was a fun, quick project that we managed to do in 45 minutes.  I'm loving seeing their Instagrams displayed on the walls upstairs along with their acrostic poems they completed in class!

South Carolina Picture Book Awards!

Every year I really enjoy sharing the South Carolina Picture Book Award Nominees with my kindergarten, first, and second grade classes.  I love seeing how excited they get about each book and the conversations that they have about why each one is their favorite!

This is my second year serving on the committee to choose the 20 books that are placed on that list.  I am especially enjoying this year's selections because it is the list that my committee chose last year!  My 4th grade daughter has also been a student member and we have had so many great conversations about these books!

At the beginning of the year (and all year long) I spend a lot of time talking about choosing just right books.  I loved how that conversation connected with Churchill's Tale of Tails by Anca Sandu.  My classes had some great discussion about why each tail didn't fit Churchill and then we extended it to talking about how you have to choose a book that fits you.  It also has some wonderful teaching moments for manners when Churchill asks nicely for his tail back instead of accusing the bird of stealing.

 

Since fall is finally here, this week I have been sharing Maple by Lori Nichols with my kindergarten and first graders.  We have talked about the parts of a tree and then connected that with reviewing the parts of a book (cover, title, author, pages, spine, etc).  They have also enjoyed coloring their own maple leaf bookmark at the end of our library time.

Practicing with DestinyQuest

I noticed my third graders needed a little more practice looking up books in Destiny Quest and finding them on the shelves.  I have done this different ways in the past with a lot of frustrations about the noise level and whether the students actually got the idea, but I think I may have finally found my favorite way to practice this!

Bethel's wonderful PTA bought the library 10 iPad minis a year or so ago, and I just keep coming up with new ways to use them.  For this activity I really wanted the third graders to be able to practice looking up a book, and then finding it on the shelf.  I decided to have them show me what they were doing by using the cameras on the minis.

First we reviewed how to look up books in Destiny Quest.  After that, I showed them how to take a screen shot of their search so they could prove they did the search and found the correct book!

After they took the screen shot they had to go to the shelf to find the book.  They took the iPad with them so they could refer back to the search if they forgot where they were going.  Once they got to the shelf and found the book they took a picture of the shelf where they found the book.

After they had both pictures, they came to me to show me so I could check their work.  Then they were free to go look for books to check out.  They had a lot of fun doing this and I loved that I could see where they went wrong if they had a problem!

4th Grade QR Quizzes

My 4th grade classes have extended their library check out time this week and next so that I can have a few minutes to share some tips about beginning research with them.  I spent a few minutes talking about using DISCUS to start their research, reminding them they can't trust everything they find on Google, and showing them the different databases that are available on DISCUS.

I find that everything makes so much more sense to them when they have time to do something with it, but we didn't have time for an activity, so I decided to do a quick quiz to make sure they got the main points.  I created a 5 question quiz on Google Forms and then made QR codes for the students to get to the link.

The students thought it was super-cool that they got to take the quiz on the iPads and they enjoyed scanning the QR code to get there.  I loved that I had all their results in one place so I could see what their answers were and go back over anything they got wrong right away!  It would be wonderful if I had an iPad for each student, but in groups I could hear them discussing and correcting each other before they answered the question.  I also had some students who weren't checking out a book who asked to look up something they were interested in researching on DISCUS!

This week in the Bethel Media Center we focused on our first check out.  I have a few favorite titles I love to share.  My kindergarten book was We're Going on a Book Hunt by Pat Miller.  It is a library version of the old story of "going on a bear hunt" that is published by Upstart.  I have the kindergartners repeat each line after me which keeps them interested and makes it a lot of fun!  I read A Library Book for Bear by Bonnie Becker to first grade to review library rules and then talk about check out.

My second grade book is a new favorite of mine that I discovered while serving on the SC Picture Book Award Committee.  It is If You Want to See a Whale by Julie Fogliano.  I absolutely love that it connects so well with the idea that you have to focus on what you need to accomplish - in our case we use it to talk about what we need to look for library books and what we need to ignore, but it could be easily used for any goal setting in the classroom. 

2nd Grade Library Orientation with Kahoot!

       The first week of school in the Bethel Elementary Media Center has been a blast!  It has been so nice to see all of the familiar faces back in the building and also to start getting to know some new faces as well.
      My second grade classes this week enjoyed library orientation Kahoot!-style.  I had tried Kahoot! last year with a few classes who really enjoyed it.  Kahoot! is a game-based learning program which lets you set up a quiz,  discussion, or survey and then have students respond using devices.  My school PTA bought the library 10 iPad minis not long ago and I have been having so much fun finding new ways to use them!
       I set up a quiz of 20 questions that I would usually ask my second graders during orientation - What is your librarian's name?  What kind of voices do we use in the library?  What do you do after you check out a book?  Who is the person who writes the book?  When the 2nd graders came in, each table of students got an ipad and joined the game.
     

       The students were very excited about this form of library orientation.  Instead of the groans and "We know this stuff" that I usually get from my older students, I got a lot of energy and smiles.  I read the questions and answers from the Promethean board and the students used the ipad at their table to answer.  They were very competitive and couldn't wait to see which table was in the lead after each question.  We discussed any wrong answers and they left ready to come back next week and check out a book! 

Starting the school year 2015-16

I am excited to be starting my third year at Bethel Elementary School!  This is my ninth year of being a media specialist.  The teacher workdays are almost over now.  The classrooms are looking like classrooms again, all decorated and ready to go.  My library is not quite there, as the painters came to paint the ceiling this week.  It currently looks like the scene from E.T. where the entire house is covered in plastic!

I can't wait to see all the students.  I have new books I want to share.  I am looking forward to getting to know the new kindergartners and my new team of 5th grade news broadcast students.  We start the morning news on the first day of school bright and early!  Our school theme for this year is Learning is Our Superpower.  Mrs. Lynch has been busy with her paintbrush over the summer and has created a beautiful bulletin board for outside the library to start the year!