Throwback Thursday

Can't Stop the Reading Video (click here!)

I love finding ways to get students excited about books.  A while back I worked with a 2nd grade teacher who loves to change the lyrics to songs to come up with a reading music video.  She also had her students record the audio for me.  Then I had so much fun hunting around the school for students and teachers who wanted to be a part of the video.  It was a great collaborative effort and everyone
really enjoyed watching the finished video on the morning news and the website!  Watching it makes me smile, and makes me want to work on another one to share!!

Black History Month, Voting, RIF, Read Across America, and Dr. Seuss!

Wow, so much going on in 1 week, but it is all so much fun!  This week in the library the younger grades are voting on the SC Picture Book Awards.  I love sharing these titles as read alouds during the school year.  I served on the committee of librarians who make the list a few years ago, so I have a special place in my heart for these books that have been nominated for the students to vote on.  I can't wait to see which book wins!


We are finishing up Black History month with a host of activities.  We had PTA last night with a beautiful chorus performance.  The parents were then invited to walk around and check out the student projects that have been completed this month, led by the students of course!  I really enjoyed seeing the finished projects in the classrooms and hallways since the library was heavily used for books and research to complete them!  We have a wonderfully diverse library collection that supported Black History Month very well.


We are also celebrating Read Across America and Dr. Seuss this week in the library and around the school.  My younger students library time this week has included a Dr. Seuss read aloud, coloring cool Dr. Seuss bookmarks, and getting to choose a RIF (Reading Is Fundamental) book to take home and keep!  I love seeing the excitement on their faces when they choose a book to keep!  My older students have also been super excited to choose a RIF book as well!

Book Fair

Valentine's Week was Book Fair week in our library!  What a great time to show our love for books and reading!  This was the first book fair that this school had hosted in over 10 years and once the students figured out what it was, they loved it!

If you talk with different librarians, you will find some that enjoy book fair and some that do not.  I LOVE sharing books with students, teachers, and parents, so I just can't imagine not having book fair because it is such a great way to get everyone excited. 

I enjoy the book talk and author videos that Scholastic puts together.  They are a great way to get the students thinking about what they might like to read.  I enjoy any time I can hear an author talk about what they have written and the students really love to put a face to the author's name.  It's like a mini author visit without having to pay anything.

I also like to bring the students in to make wish lists.  There are a lot of students at my school who don't have money to buy books, but when they make wish lists I can see what they want to read... and then I buy a copy for the library so they can check it out!!

I do a lot of reading during the book fair!  Scholastic doesn't mind if I sample the books while they are with me.  My two favorites this book fair have been: The Very Impatient Caterpillar by Ross Burach and Because of the Rabbit by Cynthia Lord.

I'm a huge Mo Willems fan and The Very Impatient Caterpillar reminded me so much of  Mo Willem's Pigeon.  This is a VERY impatient caterpillar, who can't believe he can't read a book or order a pizza while he's waiting for TWO WEEKS in a chrysalis!!  I laughed so hard at this story and I shared it with a number of classes who loved it too.

 Because of the Rabbit was a beautiful story about a 5th grade girl who is going to public school for the first time.  I don't think you can go wrong with Cynthia Lord, and this was a good example.  It was a beautiful story of how hard making friends is, how important honesty is, and how small things can bring bigger things together.

New Library Ordering

I apologize it has been a while since I’ve posted!  My family moved over the summer and it has been such a busy year! I’ve migrated what used to be BethelMediaMusings.blogspot.com over to a new home at LendingHappiness.blogspot.com and I’m going to write up some of the posts I just haven’t had time to share yet!

Two of the big curves when moving from school to school are getting to know your new reading population and getting to know your collection!  My new school is elementary, pre-kindergarten through fifth grade.  Every school is different, so spending time looking at the books you have and asking the students what they enjoy reading is very important!

I also found that my new collection didn’t have a number of my favorite series and books, so I had to add a few to the books that the students and teachers were asking for.  I have been blessed at all the schools I’ve worked for to have a healthy budget, so I got started ordering.

My daughter and I have talked about starting our own BookTube channel on Youtube.  I decided this would be good practice for me to get a little more comfortable in front of the camera and try a more flipped learning approach since I wanted to show all the new books to all my classes.  I decided to make an Everybody Book Haul and a Fiction Book Haul.

              

    

This has been a great way to share the books on the news and our website.  I’ll do another post soon about how I ended up doing smaller videos on Flipgrid and inviting my older students to start a book conversation.

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!).