Monday, March 10, 2014

Tournament of Books

In the spirit of March Madness, we are hosting a tournament of books in grades K-3. Since March is when we celebrate Dr. Seuss, we've created a bracket using 16 of his books. The kindergarten and first grade is completing one side of the bracket, and the second and third are reading the other side. After reading both books, we use a simple Google Form linked from a QR code to vote on which book students liked better.

We put the bracket on our bulletin board in the library:




And here is the bracket displayed in the hallway:



And here are the results after the Sweet 16 round:



Books that moved on from the K-1 bracket: Hop on Pop, Green Eggs & Ham, The Foot Book, The Cat in the Hat

Books left behind in the K-1 bracket: Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You?, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, Fox in Socks, There's a Wocket in My Pocket

Books that moved on from the 2-3 bracket: Horton Hears a Who, The Lorax, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, The Sneetches

Books left behind in the 2-3 bracket: Oh The Thinks You Can Think, Bartholomew and the Oobleck, Oh the Places You'll Go, Yertle the Turtle

Two of these books were decided by one vote: Green Eggs and Ham and Horton Hears a Who just squeaked out the victory!

This week the books will compete in the Elite 8 round and our champion will be crowned the following week!

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

5/6 Olympics Projects

During the Olympics this February, the 5th & 6th graders created pages about a specific sport that they were interested in knowing more about. We used a website called Smore to create the pages. Smore allows students to drag and drop items into their page easily.
We had several shortened classes and missed some classes because of all of our snow & cold days, so not everyone got a project finished. However, the ones that were finished look really cool! I love the Olympics and the kids really enjoyed getting to know more about each sport. They had recently taken a skiing trip, so they knew a bit about how hard being an Olympic athlete is. The students were also impressed that a group of teachers went to a curling lesson!

Click here to see the Pinterest board of completed projects.