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!

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.

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!