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!