#JustaChicken Author Visit

Bethel was excited to host the #JustaChicken authors last week and it was a really nice visit!  Langston Moore and Preston Thorne were extremely professional and easy to work with.  The hardest part was finding a time they were available to visit - they are in high demand!

I really liked the message of their book - you are special and amazing, you are not #justachicken!  They did a great job revving up all of our K-5 students with their "reading workout" and I really liked how they talked with the 3-5th graders about doing their best in school and not expecting sports scholarships.  I think it was helpful to hear former football players say those things to them!

They did two big sessions, visited a few classrooms, had lunch with some 4th grade boys, and then autographed books before they left!  It was a great day and a lot of fun!

Teaching Biography and Memoir with the SC PBA's

     December has been busy in the library media center!  I've been working with the 4th graders on planet research with the Chromebooks in their classrooms.  I've been doing a fun holiday read aloud with the 3rd graders in the media center.  We also had #Justachicken authors visit us!  I'll be doing a separate post for that one so I can share some fun pictures!

     In the media center with the K-2 classes I see every week, we are still reading the SC Picture Book Awards.  We have talked a lot about fiction and nonfiction, so December has us using two of the PBA books to talk about biography and memoirs!

     I used Beatrix Potter and Her Paintbox by David McPhail to introduce biography.  This is a very well written and accessible biography.  We talked about how a biography tells about someone's life.  I didn't tell them who Beatrix Potter was, but read the book and then watched them at the end to see who recognized the Peter Rabbit title.  I was surprised how many of them knew Peter Rabbit, but it helped a lot that there is a TV show of it in addition to the book.  After reading, the students have created their own tiny Peter Rabbit Christmas card with a template that I found here.


This week we are extending our knowledge of biography by talking about memoirs.  Billy's Booger: a memoir by William Joyce is cataloged in the library as a fiction book, but he says in the end papers that it is the true story of his first book (and does include the book itself), so we are talking about it as a true memoir with a few embellishments.  I wasn't sure I would be able to pull this one off with the kindergartners, but they have done really well with it.  All the students have connected with Billy not winning a prize for his book, but then feeling good about himself when his book is placed in the library.  We've had some great conversations about how sometimes winning doesn't mean you get a medal or trophy.

I really enjoy William Joyce's books.  I hunted in hope of finding an interactive app to go with Billy's Booger like the apps for The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore and Numbers, but couldn't find one.  It looks like there were plans for an app, but it is no longer available.