Book Monsters...Oh My!

As we inch closer to the end of school and the children inch closer to becoming hooligans sometimes I have to pull out the extra-engaging happy read alouds to keep lending happiness!  This week I have been having fun sharing two Usborne books Nibbles the Book Monster and Nibbles the Dinosaur Guide by Emma Yarlett. 

I love introducing my Kindergartners to Nibbles.  They study fairy tales and we have fun reviewing what actually happened before Nibbles messed up the story.

My first and second graders I introduced to Nibbles last year, but they hadn't seen the second book where Nibbles takes on the dinosaurs!  We had fun talking about how facts can be shared even in made up stories.  Sharing read alouds is one of my favorite things to do and I believe it really helps introduce students to new authors and new books they might not have picked up on their own.

I kept it simple with offering book marks to color after the story and check out this week.  I love the coloring book marks that you can get in different seasons from Demco!  The kids were feeling happy and creative after our read aloud and decided to make them look like Nibbles had been nibbling on them by cutting out bites of their book marks to really make them original!

Star Wars Day!

We are big Star Wars fans at my house and I know a LOT of my students at school are big fans, so I decided to celebrate Star Wars this week since May 4th falls on Friday.  I found so many wonderful ideas that I ended up borrowing from Pinterest, but it definitely ended up looking a lot different at the end of the week than what I started with on Monday.

My original plan was to connect my K-2 students' learning with ways they could enjoy books that they have read...how to expand their enjoyment.  I'm gearing up for summer and thinking of ways to help them stay interested and not bored.  I chose one of my Star Wars easy readers to share and then planned centers: Star Wars bookmarks, Lego building spaceships, making paper airplanes to fly at the Death Star, Droid training with my Dash robot, and a memory game which I called Jedi Mind Training.

Unfortunately, it is nearing the end of school and we are also testing 3-5th grades right now which has made the students very stir crazy!  I very quickly realized after a few classes of whining, arguing, and general chaos that I needed to simplify for my sanity.  At the end of the week my lesson was still the same, same book, but I narrowed my activities down to 2 tables of bookmarks, 2 tables of Lego spaceship building, and 2 tables of mind training.  This helped to keep my directions simple, because these children do not have concentration skills at this time of the year and allowed for 8 students at each activity so there was a lot less complaining.  I also made the students who hadn't returned books wait to go to an activity until check out was finished which helped the rush on tables!

All in all, Star Wars week was a hit and armed with my new knowledge I will definitely do it again!

Storybird Poetry with 2nd graders

I have been having so much fun this week celebrating poetry with my second graders!  I introduced them to Storybird and set them loose to choose pictures that inspired them to create poetry.  I have 15 ipads in the library so I set up a general class account for each ipad and then created a class assignment for each class.  This has worked really well, and next week I plan to let them spend some time reading each others poetry and commenting (only good comments of course!).

Sarah Mlynowski Author Visit

I love author visits!  As a librarian, I spend all day talking about books and it is so nice to be able to put a face with the names that I see on the covers.  This week we got to meet author Sarah Mlynowski who writes the Whatever After and Upside Down Magic series.

Our 3-5th graders had so much fun connecting with Sarah!  They loved hearing about how she goes about getting ideas for her books and how she outlines, then writes the draft, then goes back and edits the book before publishing.

The students really enjoyed having a brainstorming session with Sarah, and were able to impress her by coming up with an idea she hadn't heard before!  It made them so excited to know that they had come up with an idea that she hadn't thought of before!

After signing books, she was off to visit another school, but our hearts are a little warmer for meeting her and our brains are full of new creative ideas!