This week was fun, I can't lie. 4th and 5th grade participated in their first Reader's Theater. We read Halloween themed stories I got from Teachers Pay Teachers (<3) and I can already tell we are going to be doing it again in the future. 1st through 3rd all read Creepy Carrots (I'm newly obsessed with this book) doing different activities in each grade. First grade made their own creepy carrots, which means I made like 80 carrots ahead of time, and they drew faces on them. Hey, we only have 30 minutes! 2nd grade draw a face on a carrot (on a worksheet) and then had to write adjectives to describe the carrot and a sentence about the carrot. Some did better than others, but that was expected. 3rd graders did a point of view activity where they had to talk about the story from Jasper Rabbit's POV (which we kinda know already since that's the perspective from which the book is written) and then write a few sentences about the carrots POV. I compared it to the True Story of the Three Little Pigs where the wolf tells his side of the story. I wasn't here on Wednesday (another workshop!), so my kindergartners colored and labeled Halloween themed parts of a book worksheet. They did really well...I'm very proud! Now. Preschool. These are always hard lessons to plan because we have about 25 minutes, they don't check out books, they're too young to grasp things like adjectives and POV, so we usually just do a craft of some sort that is related to our book we read. Well, we read The Monster At The End Of The Book which is an all time favorite of mine. I found a few Grover crafts on Pinterest, but I decided to jump in the deep end and do a hand print painting thing. Fingers painted black, palms painted green, drying now, and will soon have faces to make them look like Frankenstein. I'm super happy how they've turned out so far!! This week was much needed after last week. I had a really fun project plan (or at least I thought it was fun), and I just KNEW my students were going to turn their noses up, but they actually surprised me! My 3rd and 4th graders read Where the Wild Things Are and then worked in groups to write an apology letter from Max to his mom for all the mischief he caused that resulted in him being sent to his room without supper. I implemented a timer in all activities this week, including check out, so they were given about 7 minutes and the table that wrote the best letter (spelling, grammar, and form count!!) won a bookmark that their teacher could sign when they read 10 books and they can then go get free ice cream! I am not above bribery. I got a lot of really great results and will definitely do this again! Kindergarten and 1st grade read Click Clack Boo (from the creators of Click Clack Moo: Cows That Type). My first graders gave me the main idea in one sentence and then 3 or 4 key details to put on a chart we hung in the hallway. Super cute! My kindergartners played a guess who game. I asked them a series of questions and they had to tell me if it was the farmer who did or said that or one of the animals. Great for comprehension checks! Unfortunately I didn't get to see 5th or 2nd grade this week because of 1) parent visitation day which had meetings in the library and 2) I was at a technology workshop. Visitation day ended with one class left in the day so my sub gave my 2nd graders a coloring page of candy corn. Except they had to make it into a monster/creature/whatever and then give 5 adjectives to describe their creation as well as a sentence or two. It looks like they took them with them. I would love to see what they came up with! I also didn't get to see my Pre-K kids because they went on a field trip to this super cool petting zoo like place in town. Lucky kids. This week wasn't one of my finest. I was out Tuesday and Wednesday for a workshop on classroom management (I really needed tips on this, btw). I got a lot of great ideas that I think once fully implemented will make my library run a lot smoother. This was my first time planning for a sub. So I did the easiest thing and left coloring sheets/work sheets. But like any good teacher/librarian, I made sure they were curriculum related or at least library related a bit. My 3rd and 4th graders got a word search, word scramble, and crossword puzzle of our library vocabulary words. You can make these puzzles online for free on a bunch of websites. Definitely a great tool to use!! My first graders and kindergartners colored what will become bookmarks. They each had one with their name on it (yes, I am that person who took hours to type individual names 4 times per child). I'm going to fold them in half and laminate them to give back to the kiddos. My kids are bookmark obsessed so I think they'll really enjoy having hand made ones! Anyway, I came back Thursday with all these new and great classroom management techniques in mind and just because the world is a weird place, my students were extra crazy that day. I gave 5th graders an activity that should've taken about 10 minutes and it took them twice as long to do about a fourth of it, at most. My second graders didn't even get to do their fun activity because they like to hear themselves talk. The speech teacher even had to come out of her office (which is in the library) to help with crowd control. She had them doing jumping jacks! All this on top of being pulled to sub in various classes at random times with little notice. By the time I got my first graders for dismissal as I do everyday, I was so beyond done. Poor kids were probably wondering what monster had replaced Ms. Frost! Friday was so much better. Preschoolers are more on my level and I only have 2 classes of Pre-K on Fridays, then planning time the rest of the day. I spent a lot of it decorating for Halloween, because Halloween. I slept from about 11PM on Friday night until nearly 6PM Saturday because of all this. Bless. I know every educator has these days/weeks, but goodness, I wasn't as ready for the crazy days as I had hoped. Oh well! Better luck next time! Here's what my kiddos did with the sub and my Halloween decor ($13 total at the Dollar General!). So because of testing this week, I only had classes half a day on Thursday and my preschoolers on Friday. I hate when we have to cancel library class, but testing is a reality in school life so as Tim Gunn would say, we make it work! I also kept my lessons simple this week because I didn't want to do something awesome and the other classes miss out. The one fifth grade class I had read the Lorax and then we did some inferring and using context clues to figure out what some of those crazy Dr. Seuss made-up words meant. Because I'm like Doug the dog from up ("SQUIRREL!"), I got very distracted by the awesome-ness of made up words and decided to recite Jabberwocky to the kids. I had to memorize it in 9th grade which was 13-14 years ago. I will never forget it. We may have to do a lesson with 5th graders about Jabberwocky, because Lewis Carroll is everything. I did a read-aloud of Interrupting Chicken by David Ezra Stein with my second graders. Number 1, I LOVE this book!! and 2, interruptions are insanely real and we needed to talk about it in context of library behavior so it was kind of a twofer. I asked questions like why they thought the little red chicken interrupted her papa and what she could've done instead of interrupting. We also brainstormed different types of interruptions. I've learned a lot in my first month or two that talking is not the only interruption. Now, I can ask them to not be interrupting chickens!! My preschoolers are tough to plan a lesson for. They really can't grasp fiction and non-fiction and themes and such so I usually just read a few stories, talk about them, and then do a related activity. This week we read Don't Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus by Mo Willems. Why? Because Mo Willems is everything (sorry Lewis Carroll, you just got demoted). I plan on doing an author study on him in the spring. So anyway, I hear they don't really color in preschool much because of standards and such (what?!) so I wanted them to have a cool picture of the pigeon to color. I couldn't find one online that I liked, but I did find a tutorial on how to draw the pigeon, so I just drew one and made copies. I love coloring sheets for the kids because I like sitting with them and coloring my own copy. You're never too old or cool for some Crayola! I spent most of the rest of the day making substitute plans for next week. I'll be out two days at some professional development workshops. I'm pretty pumped about the easy but fun stuff I'm leaving for my sub. ALSO, this week I did boring stuff like cataloging new books (boo cataloging and processing but YAY for new books!) and messed with some of my decor. I'm so happy it's October. We are about to do a lot of cool stuff with monsters/ghosts/vampires/zombies/etc for the month. I love love Halloween so we are spending the whole month on it! |
About MeI am a first year elementary school librarian, and let me say it is QUITE the adventure! Although I've worked in public libraries on and off for 10 years, this is a horse of a different color. Bare with me as I brave the new struggles and pure joy that this career is bringing! Archives
March 2016
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