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.

Non-Fiction Skills Practice

About this time of year, I like to review using non-fiction reading skills with 1st through 3rd grades; specifically we work on using the table of contents, glossary, and index. I use several books from the Animal Safari & Backyard Animals series from Scholastic that are at a 1st grade reading level. That way, almost everyone can read the text and the questions in the quizzes I create.

I use Google Forms to create small quizzes for each book. Each quiz has 2-3 comprehension questions, and 2 each for table of contents, index and glossary. I love using Forms for this because it is so easy to assess them using the Flubaroo extension.

The forms are also very easy for the students to use. I link each quiz to a QR code that is taped into the front of each book. They use their iPads to scan the codes and it goes straight to the questions.

Many of the students chose to work with a partner, which was great. They read the book first, then scanned the code and answered the questions using the book.

Augmented reality is something that I think will be big in education soon, and I wanted to try something really simple using AR. We had used it for Dot Day, but that was really just for fun. I was trying to think of a simple way to embed some learning using augmented reality, but still keep it very simple for these youngest students. 

I decided to use the Layar website and app to accomplish this. It was very easy to create a simple campaign. I took a picture of the front of each book, uploaded it into the Layar creator, and linked a YouTube video about each animal, using either videos from National Geographic or from zoos around the country. One video used the vocabulary word "pronk" from the book about gazelles. The kids were excited to read the word, use the glossary to find out what it meant, then watch a video of real gazelles pronking! 

The video about how bats use echolocation was a very popular one! It was fun to use augmented reality through the Layar app to extend learning and reach students who are visual learners. I'm excited to try to find more ways to use AR! 

Ugly Pie

We have started reading the Goldfinch Awards books in K-2. One of the books is Ugly Pie by Lisa Wheeler. I love cooking, so I thought it'd be fun to make some ugly pies. There is a recipe in the back of the book, and I thought about making that, but I looked on TeachingBooks.net and found an idea that had each students build their own pie. I decided to do that, because then each child could pick what they wanted in their "pie" and what order they put things in, and then everyone's recipes would be somewhat different.

I created a recipe template for them to use to record their recipe.

While they were working, I gave them the word list for words they'd need on their recipe card. The ingredients we separated by commas, and the steps we wrote in full sentences.

I gave kids their ingredients, and let them create however they wanted. They didn't have to use all of the ingredients if they didn't want to. The kids loved getting to "cook" in the library. I heard many say that it was their favorite day all year. After creating their pie, then they filled out their cards, and then they could eat!

I just love days where I get to do so many of my favorite things with my favorite kids!

My Favorite Books of 2013

Goodreads tells me that I read 64 books this year, but I'm not entirely sure how accurate it is, as sometimes it doesn't automatically time stamp the finish date. I also rarely log my picture books, because I read several of those per day. I'm sure 64 is close, though, as far as everything besides picture books goes. I've split them up into categories, and only picked one book per category.

If you're interested in what else I've been reading, check out my Goodreads page or my book quotes document.

Favorite Picture Book:

 

Unicorn Thinks He's Pretty Great by Bob Shea was by far my favorite picture book that I read this year. It is just so funny! I laughed out loud several times while reading it, and then laughed again and again as I read it to my K-2 students. The goat putting the plunger on his head and dancing around like a pretty little unicorn is an image that will stay with me forever, I think. The pictures are gorgeous, and you learn to love and accept both unicorn and goat. I think everyone can relate well to goat--there's always a unicorn in your life, someone who is constantly doing everything better than you are. But, as goat learns in the end, even unicorns have their struggles. 

Middle Grade:

I first read Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper in January. I absolutely loved it and handed it to every 5th-8th grader that I possibly could, and every single one of them loved it. Then, it was chosen for the Global Read Aloud for Fall 2013, and I couldn't have been happier. That means that every 4th-6th grader in our school heard this powerful story of Melody and her struggles and achievements while dealing with the cerebral palsy that had defined her for so long. This is such a powerful book that has a message that every student should hear, one of acceptance, belief and love. This book sparked so many quality conversations about how we treat people who are different than us, and what it means to be brave. 

Young Adult:

This was much too complicated to have to choose one, and since this is my blog and I get to make the rules, I'm saying that this trilogy, Divergent by Veronica Roth was my favorite YA read of 2013. I have never read books so fast, nor have I ever had as many heated conversations in as many places--Twitter, Facebook, real life conversations with students, friends, and strangers. My favorite conversation of 2013 happened with a student on Twitter about Allegiant. It was over 1.5 hours and over 70 tweets back and forth about the book. I invested several hours AFTER reading Allegiant reading review after review and tweet after tweet, plus reading all that Veronica Roth had to say about it in her blog. I just don't even have words to describe how much I love these books. Truly. 

Adult:

This was possibly the easiest choice for me, as adult books aren't my favorite. Honestly, I only read them when they are part of our book club. But this is by far my favorite book we've ever read for book club. The Storyteller was nothing like any other Jodi Picoult book I've read. I'm not a huge fan of hers, but I'm wondering if I've just read the wrong books by her that didn't pique my interest. This was a story of a German man who killed people in the Holocaust, and a bakery shop girl whose Jewish family was impacted by the very same man and how their worlds collide in a strange way when he asks her to kill him.

Professional:

I can't believe I hadn't read this until this year. Every pre-service teacher should be required to read this. Such a different approach to teaching reading, but one that I truly believe would help kids enjoy reading more, thus choose to read more. This is another book that I wrote so many quotes down from it that I practically rewrote the whole book--so many I had to create a separate Google Doc from my regular book quotes one. 

Goals for next year:

--75 books

--log more picture books