1st Grade I Am Poems

1st Graders wrote some "I Am" poems during poetry month. They turned out really great!

 Click here to see the full book.

Here is a preview of the first few pages:

2nd Grade Tongue Twisters

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During poetry month, 2nd graders learned about alliterations. To practice, we wrote tongue twisters & added an image from Clipart. We invited some middle schoolers in to read them, and it was hilarious to listen to them read the tongue twisters three times fast! A lot of them were too hard!

Scooter!

One of our recent robotics projects was to design a practical robot. One student made a scooter that he could ride around on using our Lego & Tetrix parts. (If you're super anxious to see the video, just skip to the bottom.)

We had never programmed from scratch in LabView before, but we had to figure it out for this project. We watched several YouTube video tutorials, read some tutorials online & played around in the software. The programming took about two weeks.

Our robot has 4 motors. The left motors are connected to a touch sensor, so that when you press it, both wheels on the left side move. The right side is configured the same way, to a separate touch sensor. Each side of the scooter is placed into a continuous loop so that it works until you turn the scooter off. Then, those loops are placed inside a larger loop.

In the world of programming, this isn't very complicated, but we had never worked in this interface before, and it was frustrating at times, but very rewarding in the end. As it turned out, all we needed to adjust was our loops to make it work from our original programming.

And here it is in action!

Paint Chip Poems

I've been scoping out Pinterest periodically to find a fun project to do with all of the paint chips I picked up this summer when trying to figure out how to paint my condo. Let's be honest, I picked up far, far more chips than I needed and bothered a lot of people into which ones they thought looked best. And luckily, I kept them. Finally in my search the other day I found a project with the paint chips AND poems! Whoa!

So, here's the product--students were using colors as a metaphor for a feeling. Then, they were to try to find two examples of that color matching that emotion in their life or the world. Some struggled, as that comparison is sort of complex. Others didn't have enough time. Several of them turned out really well.

Here are a few of my favorites:

I put our whole collection into a Flipsnack book. You can see the first 15 pages below, or click here to see the whole book.

List Poems K-1

Last week, the kindergarten & first grade students studied list poems. We read several list poems and then decided to make our own.

We wrote a list poem about the circus:

One about what you'd see in our library:

And two about what you'd see in the zoo. 

I thought our kids did an awesome job of writing and drawing. Our kindergarten students, especially, are great writers. They were very proud of the poems hanging around the room and wandered around reading them.

6th Grade Book Spine Poems

As part of our poetry celebration, the 6th graders wrote book spine poems. These poems use the titles of books to create a poem using the stack of books. The students used our school's online library catalog, Destiny, to create a list of books around a theme that they chose. It was good practice using our catalog and searching for books in the library. The poems turned out great!

Miss Lerch's class poems:



Ms. Kremer's class poems:



Not all of the students got finished, but I thought the ones who did finish did a nice job.

Poetry Raps

One of the reasons that I love April is because it is National Poetry Month. I have always had a soft spot for poems--I enjoy reading them, writing them, singing them, and now rapping them. If anyone still believes a school library should be a quiet place, they would hate visiting me.

I try to help children love poetry by doing fun activities with poems. In 3rd and 4th grade the last two weeks we've been reading and rehearsing favorite poems from Shel Silverstein, Jeff Moss, Alan Katz, Jack Prelutsky, Laura Purdie Salas and others. Students looked through lots of poems and selected their favorite. The only requirement was that they needed to find a poem that had a rhythm and rhyme to it.

After choosing a poem, we practiced reading the poem over and over to increase fluency and be able to read it faster. We used GarageBand to create a drum track. Then we recorded the poem to the beat of the drums. The students had a really great time creating these, and many of them even memorized their poem. I thought the final products turned out well.

Here are the playlists for the two 3rd grade classes:








One of the 4th grade classes is still finishing up, so I will post those next week.

Reading!

This month the library is abuzz with poetry. At any given time, you will hear us rapping, tapping, making podcasts, reading, rhyming, making tongue twisters....and the list goes on. Today, I read some animal poems aloud and we looked at the amazing photography in the book National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry. The photos are amazing and the poems have things to learn in them about the animals. 

Today was also a checkout day for K-1, so they spent some time looking at and checking out books. I was able to get around and take some photos and listen to some reading. These kids' reading skills are totally taking off this time of year. It was awesome to go around and listen to them sounding out words, making meaning and sharing with others. These kids have great teachers!

Cool Robotics Projects

The students in my robotics class are having fun building something that is practical for them or for someone else. One student is building a scooter. Two students are building projects that have to do with the Magic card game. One deals the cards, and another counts the points. The other student is creating a robot that will turn on a teacher's projector because she is too short to reach up to the button easily.

Here is Olin explaining his Magic card dealer:

Jeremy has his scooter built & is working on the programming in LabView. We are doing more than we've done this year in the LabView programming, so we are learning a lot! It has been frustrating at times, but I think the final project will be totally worth it. We have about 1/4 of the programming finished.

ICCA Pizza Party Celebration

At the beginning of the year I offered an incentive to the 5th & 6th grade to read the books on the ICCA award list. We had a lot of students that read the books and enjoyed most of them. It has been fun talking with students about these books throughout the year. A couple of weeks ago, we voted for our favorite which we submitted to the committee that counts the votes for the whole state. Each student who read more than one book from the list voted. Almost all of our students were able to vote. Runaway Twin by Peg Kehret won by a few votes over Million Dollar Throw by Mike Lupica. It was announced at the school library conference this week that Runaway Twin won the overall vote for the state, making it Iowa's Children Choice award for the 2012-2013 school year. The students were excited to find out that it won!

Any student who read more than 7 books, or 1/3 of the list was invited to a pizza party. We used the bookmarks from the ICCA website to keep track and we had 12 kids complete the incentive. Here are a few photos from our party! Pizza, juice boxes, cookies & music makes for a fun lunch for me too!

Thanks, Ame!

A couple of weeks ago, I read "Boy + Bot" to my kindergarten and 1st grade classes. Anyone who knows much about our school knows that we are crazy about robots. We started with a high school robotics team, now we have two high school teams. We also have 3 middle school Lego League teams, and we have Junior Lego League for K-4. We also hosted a robotics camp last year for students in K-6 grades and had over 30 kids. And the biggest robot fan of all...? It's me! The coach of all of these wonderful teams. I absolutely love being involved in robotics. It is so cool to see the ingenuity of students to create robots, and I love making things too. It is an awesome STEM opportunity for our students and I am very proud to be involved in it.

All of this to say, we are crazy about robots, so the kids loved Ame Dyckman's book, "Boy+Bot." I happened to see that she was a Twitter user, so I tweeted at her that the students enjoyed the book. She tweeted right back saying that she would send us stickers and bookmarks. How awesome is that?! Within a week, my kids were wearing their stickers and utilizing those bookmarks.

We spent a class period relishing in our gifts and writing thank you notes to Ame. Here's a video of us in action:

First Week of Poetry

April is National Poetry Month, and poetry is one of my favorite things! We started out the month by reading poems from several different authors. I meet with each class twice per week, so the first day we do poetry reading and this week we wrote acrostic name poems the second day. Acrostics are a fun way to start and they are a bit easier for young students. Kids in 1st-3rd grades wrote acrostic name poems. I was at a conference the day the 2nd & 3rd graders wrote theirs, so I haven't uploaded their PDF's yet, but here is what the first graders came up with. They wrote about things they like to do, or if they couldn't think of anything, they just picked a words they liked. We also practiced using dictionaries to look up words for letters they got stuck on. Lots of them are really cute, and I love their inventive spellings. Click here to see all the pages--it only lets me embed the first 15.



The fourth graders started our poetry unit reading "Love That Dog" by Sharon Creech. They weren't too excited about poetry, but once I started reading, they begged me to keep going when class was over! On Friday, I gave them time to explore an app called Poetry Magnets on their iPads. I wish that we had the Word Mover app or the Poetry Creator app, but we didn't. Honestly, I love poetry magnets, but it does have a few "bad words" in it. I showed the students where to navigate to in order to avoid the naughty words, but I just wish those weren't in there! There is a zombie words category, though, which the students loved. Many of the poems below are zombie-inspired.




Lots more poetry to come in the next few weeks!