Greek Mythology Fun

For the past few weeks, fourth graders have been reading and researching about gods and goddesses from Greek mythology. Not all of them were 100% excited until they started reading about their chosen god/goddess and making connections with how they were related to other students' gods. It was so funny to hear students telling others that they were their wife/husband or that they threw someone else in to the sea. They thought it was hilarious and it was really engaging, plus it helped the students makes connections in their learning.

As their main source of information, students used Britannica online. The table below is from Britannica. The students were able to look at this table, see a glimpse of what each god was all about, and choose one based on their own interest. A student interested in hunting would choose Artemis, while a student interested in music might choose Apollo.

After choosing who they wanted to research, they clicked on the orange hyperlink to go to that article. Another thing I love about Britannica is that it will read the article aloud. Some of my students wanted to read it, but others like to listen. This was especially nice for some of the students who had longer articles, as well as for some who needed help pronouncing some of the words. Who doesn't need help pronouncing some of those names!?

While reading or listening students were taking notes. We worked on breaking the articles down into paragraphs and determining the main idea and supporting details from each paragraph. This is what our notes looked like:

The next step was for students to use iClipArt to find pictures that matched their research. Each students goal was to find 8-10 pictures. After we found pictures, we put them into iMovie on our iPads and recorded our voices over the pictures. Then, we made a Keynote slide to use as a title page and we were finished.

I am so proud of how these movies turned out. All of the students were engaged, interested, and created an awesome final product to show their learning. We had a fun class period watching these to celebrate! 

Library Displays

Basically, I create a Pinterest board, and my library associate, Jennifer makes everything happen. I am going to be lost when she is gone for maternity leave in a couple of weeks!

Here are some of our current displays:

I love these signs, and the kids have had a good time quizzing each other on which places belong to which books and talking about which place they'd go if they could pick one.

Many of our classes are learning about the Olympics right now, and this is our medal count wall. Our goal is to update daily, but we're already running out of space!

This is incredibly hard to see, but it says, "Are you a library book, 'cause I'm checkin' you out!"

Our "Read Box" where everything is free. The humor of this was lost on most of the kids, but several of them got it.

This one is actually taken down now, but I'm not sure I ever shared it before. I try to put things to attract older students in this case since the high school students walk past this, but may never step foot into the library.

6th Grade Winter Holidays

6th graders spent time in December and January researching how different countries celebrate Winter holidays. Students used the research feature in Google Docs to take notes on their chosen holiday. Then, they found images to match the information, put those into a slideshow using Google Presentation, then finally downloaded the slides as images, put them into Movie Maker, recorded a voice over, and added music. Whew--they were busy!

Here are the final products:

Winter ABC Book

ABC books are so much fun! Each year, 3rd graders read several examples of ABC books and then create their own. This year, we chose a winter theme. The class was split into groups of 4 and we used huge sheets of chart paper to make word lists. Each group rotate to each letter on the chart, and then when they got back to their original spot, they picked their favorite winter words and split up the letters to make a book. We used iClipart to find our pictures and put them into Keynote to make book pages. Each student turned their pages in to me and we created a class book.

To see the entire book, click here.