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!