SC Picture Book Awards

Every year I really enjoy sharing the SC Picture Book Award Nominees with my Kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grade students.  For the past 2 years my daughter and  I served on the committee that chose the books and I have to admit, while it was a LOT of reading,  I'm really missing it this year!

We have still been having a lot of fun with our "voting books" as the kids refer to them, so I thought I would take a minute to share some of the titles we have read and what we've done with them.

We started the year with My Teacher is a Monster by Peter Brown. I shared in this post about what we did with it and our centers back in August.  It was such a great book to start with and I keep referring back to it every time I start to feel a little "monster-ish" because someone isn't following directions!

 Peanut Butter and Cupcake by Terry Border was a lot of fun to share and had us talking about choosing just right books.  When Peanut Butter wants to make a new friend he has to talk to a lot of people before finding out who he connects with.  We had some great conversations about how you have to "talk" to a lot of books (look inside and read a little) before you can really decide which one you want to read that week.

We had some similar conversations with The Monkey Goes Bananas by C.P. Bloom about taking care of our books.  There are a lot of things in that book that are not friendly to books (water, sand, animals, food, etc.)
                                        

We used Dog vs Cat by Chris Gall and Ivan the Shopping Mall Gorilla by Katherine Applegate to talk about fiction and nonfiction.  Ivan is the only nonfiction book on the list this year, but it is so awesome!

In Breaking News: Bear Alert by David Biedrzycki we enjoyed talking about cause and effect - what was it that caused everything to happen in the story?  Well, if they just hadn't poked the sleeping bear...

And Pardon Me by Daniel Miyares had us in great conversation about the main idea of the story and how if the little bird had JUST been a little more POLITE maybe he might not have gotten eaten!!

               

Mister Bud Wears the Cone by Carter Goodrich helped us to make predictions about what we thought would happen in the story - was he going to like the cone, would he get in trouble, what was going to happen?!?

Gaston by Kelly Dipucchio was excellent for talking about characters in the story.  Poor Gaston really thinks he is a poodle.  It's An Orange Aardvark by Michael Hall had us in stitches while we tried to gather information as we read to figure out what was on the outside of the ants' log!

                                 

We read A Piece of Cake by LeUyen Pham after stuffing ourselves at Thanksgiving and tested our memories by seeing if we could retell the story afterward.  It would also be great for sequencing!  And then last week all my classes enjoyed reading Flight School by Lita Judge and discussing how giving up on your dreams isn't something you should ever do!

That's our reading list so far - I'll do a second post once we have read the rest of them and talk about our voting!

Makerspace Club

This year the media specialists at Greenville County Schools have started talking more about makerspaces.  I have been playing with a few things already and have added some creative outlets in my K-2 library centers, but I also wanted to give it a try with some of my older students.  I now have a 5th grade makerspace club that meets once a month!

Our first meeting in September we talked about what Makerspaces are and how we want to foster creativity.  For this meeting in October, I decided to read them Going Places by Peter and Paul Reynolds and then let them explore some low-tech ideas.

They had great fun creating different lego devices...

As well as trying some origami and duct tape crafting...

And some binary coding with beads! 

Author Visit!

The highlight of my week was having picture book author Kristy Dempsey visit Bethel last Friday!  I love reading to my students, but it is rare that they really get the chance to meet an author and connect on that level.  

I was so excited last spring when Kristy emailed the Greenville County Media Specialists to let us know that she would be home in Traveler's Rest, SC for the 2016-17 school year.  She is also the librarian at an international school in Brazil.  We had just found out that our school theme for the year would be "Our Adventure Starts Here" and I thought it would be such a great connection to make between her adventures and how she uses them in her writing!

It was such a lovely visit!  Kristy talked to all 1005 of our students about her adventures and how they help her to write as well as read us her newest book The Superhero Instruction Manual (which everyone loved!!).  I really enjoyed talking to her too.  It was so interesting to compare library stories from two different countries.

After the final presentation, I snapped this picture as Kristy sat on the floor and chatted with one class as the rest were filing out and their teacher was heating her lunch.  What a nice day and a great impact on students!

Jumping into genrefication

This week I have officially jumped into genrefying the fiction section of our library.  I had been researching and even bought genre stickers last year from Demco, but I hadn't actually started until this week.  I was inspired to finally jump in by two things.  One was watching my older kids, who I have worked so hard to teach Destiny to, struggle to find books using the catalog which has led me down the rabbit hole of "how can I help them?" And "why aren't they getting it?"  The second thing was reading Andy Plemmons blog posts about genrefying his library at the beginning of the year and how much it has helped the children to find books.

Does it really help them for me to keep beating Destiny into them, or does it make more sense to arrange books in a way that makes sense to them if it helps them find books they will read?  I am getting on the wagon with those who would like the children to be able to find things to read!

So as I have been hanging out in the floor putting genre stickers on books I have made some new friends as students on passes have asked me what I am doing.  They have been so excited to explore the section I have finished and I haven't even put all of a genre together yet.  It makes me excited for when I can get it all finished!

Back to School 2016!

So we are back to school in South Carolina, and I wanted to share what I'm doing with the SCASL Picture Book Award Nominees this year!  I started day 1 with classes in the library and I have had so much fun sharing My Teacher is a Monster! by Peter Brown with my Kindergarten, first, and second graders.

This book is a wonderful lead into talking about rules in the classroom or library!  As I was reading, we had to stop and talk about what poor Bobby did wrong, and in every class someone noticed that the teacher started looking a little less monster-y before the end of the book which led to great discussions on how to keep your teacher (or librarian) from turning into a monster!

I also started the year with library centers and dedicated a couple of them to monsters because of this book.  The kids have had so much fun creating monsters with my legos and playing on Sago Mini's Monster App!  I love having the centers to help keep them busy at the end so I can help those stragglers find books.

I put directions and standards on the sides of my centers so I don't have to explain what to do, but I try to keep them simple enough that they don't need much explaining.

The Monsters App by Sago Mini was free when I got it and my students absolutely love making their online monster, feeding it, and even brushing it's teeth!

Spring Book Buying Club

Last week we finished off our 4th Grade Spring Book Buying Club by looking over all the books they purchased and then creating ads for them to share with everyone at school!  The students enjoyed being the first to look through the new books.

After looking at them, I pulled out the ipads and they worked in pairs to create a flyer of a few books they would recommend to other students.  We used the app PicCollage for this and then uploaded them to a Padlet that could be shared.

After two groups this year, I will definitely do this again!  The students really enjoyed the process of adding new books to our library collection.

Created with Padlet

Trying New Things

I am  trying something new in the library this week that I'm hoping will help to engage the students through the end of school.  My kindergarten through second grade students visit the library weekly for 30 minutes for a lesson and book check out.  Our usual procedure is for them to sit at the tables and read the books they check out, but as we are nearing the end of the year everyone is very antsy!

I have considered adding centers for them to do after they check out to help keep them engaged (and for those students who can't check out because they forgot their book), but I just hadn't started it up.  So I decided that the end of school was a great time to experiment and work out the kinks!  If it doesn't work well then letting it go at the end of the year isn't a big deal.  However, after a few days trial, I'm thinking this is a great thing so far!

I set up 7 centers to start with: Independent Reading, Listening, Bookmark making, Ipad word work, Ipad retelling, Creation station with Legos, and a Rhyming game station.  I'm switching out the Ipad retelling that I was doing with Puppet Pals to an Eric Carle board game today because there have been issues with that center.  The favorite  center so far has been the creation station where they get to make a duck and read duck books (I read a duck story before introducing the centers).  If you haven't seen Cari Young's website or book on centers, it is very helpful!!

Some classes have done better than others, and there is always the student that doesn't want to do anything but the center that is already full, but overall this seems to be working well!

Spring Book Fair

It is time for our spring book fair! The trees and flowers are blooming, and the excitement is contagious at Bethel!  I love running book fair.  There is something about seeing the students get so excited about new books that just makes me grin!  I also love the conversations I get to have with teachers as they preview the new books and the chance it gives me to recommend titles.

Book fair was delivered today and this is what the second grade class that was in the library did when they saw the truck drive in!  Students are excited about books at Bethel Elementary!!

Ebook Week

This week we have been celebrating ebooks with Kindergarten, first, and second graders in the library.  Many of them didn't know that ebook stood for electronic book even though most of them had read an ebook before.  We also had technical difficulties to navigate through as I was trying to show them the ebooks we have in Destiny.  I had planned on reading one of those ebooks to them, but ended up using a Tumblebook when my Destiny ebooks wouldn't load.

Despite tech difficulties, the show went on and K, 1, and 2 students got to both hear a Tumblebook and explore the Epic! app at the tables after check out to read additional ebooks.  All of them showed a definite preference for the ebooks that would read the book to them!

4th Grade Book Buying Club

This fall I had an open spot in my schedule during our clubs, so I asked if I could start a book buying club for 4th graders.  I had seen the awesome results that Andy Plemmons at Barrow Elementary School in Georgia had gotten by having students help with book buying in the library and I wanted to give it a try.

Students at our school get a list of choices and I ended up with 15 students who wanted to try me out. They were so excited when I told them at our first meeting that they would get a chance to spend $500 of my library budget on books that they chose.  We talked about what types of books to order, how to look up reviews to see if the book was good, and how to budget our money.

After they came up with a list and adjusted and reviewed it, I placed the book order.  Today, they got to meet one final time to unpack the box, set up a display, and choose a book to share on the news with the school to show what we have been doing!  This has been so much fun for me and the students and I can't wait for my second group to start in February!!

3rd Grade Book Tasting

Third graders are getting a taste of some different genres in the library this week and next to encourage them to try something different.  So often I see students check out the same thing over and over, so we are trying something new!

I pulled stacks of easy chapter books for mystery, humor, realistic fiction, biography, fantasy, and action/adventure.  Each table was a different genre.  I created a bookmark menu for them to write the title of the book they "tasted" at each table.  They got a few minutes at each table to choose a book, write the title, and read the first page or so to decide if they liked it or not.