Honestly, I'm just posting this to see if I can get these images to work properly...you should be able to hover over the little red and white dots to see what is found there in the library!This week was just madness! We had early dismissal on Tuesday for a potential severe weather situation, and I was out Thursday! But in between all that, we continued with genres and talked about biographies. I tried to also pick African-Americans and lesser known people so I could tie this into Black History Month. We talked about Mae Jemison, Wilma Rudolph, Matthew Henson, Thurgood Marshall, Misty Copeland, and a few more that we just looked up for fun. I used this as an opportunity to show the students Alabama Virtual Library. While I was out Thursday, I left a packet for the 5th graders about Thurgood Marshall and then a few worksheets to do about him. For the 2nd graders I missed Thursday, I had them write a biography about their neighbor at their table using a worksheet. It looks like they did really well, so that makes me proud! I also set up my Valentine's Day displays and my Black History Month displays. We are also starting the chart our progress in Accelerated Reader for the semester too so I'm excited for the kids to see that when they come down the hallway for dismissal this afternoon. Also! Our grow lab for the garden is thriving! They will get transplanted in no time!This week we did different lessons with upper and lower grades. My upper grades (3rd-5th) read fractured fairy tales as a continuation of our genre study; then we compared the fractured story to the original using a Venn diagram. I think this went over well, but I definitely have some kinks to work out if I do it again next year. My lower grades (K-2nd) read Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes and Pete the Cat: Rocking in the School Shoes. Pete the Cat is one of the best and there's always a song involved so they really go into it! We then took pictures of everybody's shoes and I'm in the process on making a book of our shoes called Central Elementary: Rocking in our School Shoes. They're really excited about that! I didn't have Pre-K this week because I had to go to a workshop. But we did have the 100th day of school this week on January 28!! Only 70-80 more!Last semester I didn't have quite the participation in Accelerated Reader as I had hoped. Only 5 kids met their goals, two 4th graders and three 2nd graders (my school in Pre-K through 5th grade). So this week I used a projector to show them how to log in to their accounts, get to the quiz section, find their book, take a quiz, see their score, see their point goal, etc. We read a book together and took a quiz together. Hopefully this showed them if they've read the book, there shouldn't be any problem taking the test AND making a good score. We also now have a grow lab in our library! Our school has a learning garden outside and they needed a place to keep the seedling inside until they're ready to be transplanted to the main garden. So it's here in the library and a class comes in every afternoon to water the plants. Super cool. Next week I think I'm scrapping all lesson plans (let's be honest, I didn't really have any plans yet), and talking about how to get a book off a shelf without making a huge mess!Our first week back at school was only 3 days so I didn't hold classes. I just lesson planned and cleaned and did a bunch of boring stuff. The next week back was a full week, but between meetings and testing, I only saw a handful of students. We were SUPPOSED to go over the Accelerated Reader program, however, my technology failed at the last minute so we switched to talking about genres which I'd planned to do the following week. THIS is why I plan ahead! So I have this cute little tree and all the branches have different genres written on them. We talked about what they all were and then I picked books and had the students try to guess the genre. We then wrote the book title on a leaf and stuck it on the appropriate tree branch. Super cute. However, I was only about to do this with 3rd grade completely. So we will continue next week. That's a little much for Kindergarten and Preschool so we talked about fiction and non-fiction with the kindergartners and had them choose between a book about cows and Click, Clack, Moo! Cows That Type and pick which one was fiction and which was non-fiction. Preschool we reinforced author and illustrator because I had just gotten word we'd be having an author visit the following week. So I read a few of her books and then talked about what an author and an illustrator does. It was a pretty easy week, but I got a few displays done and more planned in my head.So for the ONE week I had my kiddos this month, we talked about Christmas around the world. Each class had a different country, and we looked up facts about the country (Population, location, capital, etc) and then how they celebrated Christmas (or didn't) and also how to say "Merry Christmas" in their language. We listened to a Christmas song for each country, too. And by that I don't mean we listened to Jingle Bells in Arabic. We listened to a legit Arabic Christmas song. I was inspired by a conversation I was having with a teacher about the best time to visit Disney World. I told her I had been at Christmas once and each country in Epcot is done up in their version of Christmas. I think the kids liked the change of pace and also learned something! With the older ones, I told them why it is important to learn about other people around the world. Because we got wrapped up sometimes and forget we aren't the only ones on this planet. We are 1 out of 7 billion, and when the students laughed at how "funny sounding" their Christmas music was or their language was, I reminded them that people in Nigeria probably think we sound funny and goodness knows our music sounds ridiculous to them! Overall, it went really well and I will definitely do it again next year! So I didn't have classes this week because we were doing some standardized testing, but I did get the library ready for Christmas! Check out my holiday stuff!Dinovember has come and gone. I think it went well :) For our final week Pre-K and Kindergarten read Saturday Night At The Dinosaur Stomp about a dino dance party, and then used plastic dinosaurs whose feet had been dipped in paint to have a dino dance party on this big sheet of white paper. Super cute and they had fun! 1st grade read Dinosaur vs the Library and then did a worksheet that said "Dinosaur vs. _____" and they got to fill in the blank and draw a picture of what the dinosaur was fighting. 2nd grade read How Do Dinosaurs Go To School, which is part of a great series. They then had to make a list of the things the dinosaurs did at school and place them under the category of good dinosaur behavior or bad dinosaur behavior. I have some trouble with my 2nd graders' behavior so we might have to do more things like this. 3rd grade read Dinopets Go To School which is very repetitive in saying "I got a dino for a pet. The biggest/tallest/smartest dino I could get." So we made a book about pets going to school and they filled in the blanks and drew a picture on a worksheet that said "I got a ____ for a pet. The _____est _____ I could get!" Some really creative ideas came out of this! 4th grade talked about how dinosaurs are extinct and so are a lot of other animals. We discussed endangered animals and listed some, then they wrote an acrostic poem using the word "endangered." Most of them had never heard of an acrostic, so they weren't exactly what I was hoping for, but practice makes perfect! Finally, I subjected my 5th graders to a TED talk! This whole month all they've wanted to talk about dino-wise if Jurassic World, so I found a TED talk about bringing animals back from extinction. It was a really great lecture that didn't use far out, crazy lingo they wouldn't understand. Then they wrote about what animal they'd like to bring back from extinction and what it would be like to have that animal back! This is the TED talk we watched with 5th grade.
Good times continue in the library! I didn't get to see Kindergarten or 3rd grade this week because we were out of school for Veterans Day. I never left my house and sat on the couch in my pajamas ALL DAY! It was amazing! Preschool read 3 stories (hey, I've got to fill up 30 minutes and they don't check out books and I don't want library time to ALWAYS be arts & crafts time as much as I love making stuff). We then talked about the last story "The Super Hungry Dinosaur"which is about a dinosaur with no manners trying to eat this kid and his family. We made a Helpful Handbook For Dinosaurs that was full of instructions on how a dinosaur could be better behaved. So I guess we did make something, but it was just as a group this time. My first graders made dinosaur sun catchers from contact paper and tissue paper squares. Concerns were as follows: not getting all the dinosaur outlines cut out in time because of a meeting I had to go to and because I have a serious complex where I have to over-achieve and have them ALL done before the first class comes in; having little squares of tissue paper all over the library; this taking way too much time/not enough time. None of the above happened! All dino outlines were done, I only had to pick up 2-3 squares of tissue paper (from nearly 80 kids), and it was the perfect time-filler between story time and check out! They're now shining brightly in my one tiny library window! 2nd grade read "Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs" by (guess who!) Mo Willems and did a few activities. In one, I wrote some passages from the story on the white board and we underlined verbs with blue, nouns with pink, adjectives with green, etc. The other thing we did was a sequencing activity with parts of the story I'd printed out and mixed up. 2nd graders can be a handful, so we can't do many hands on activities but we're working on that! 4th and 5th grade didn't have to suffer through story time this week, which they were pretty pumped about. Instead, I gave each table a page of information on a dinosaur I had found using Alabama Virtual Library and Encyclopedia Britannica Elementary. They had to use this to fill out a sheet of basic information about their dinosaur and then draw a picture. I compiled all of this into a Dinosaur Encyclopedia. It's pretty neat. I hung up a sign in the hall and sent out an email to the teachers to swing by and have a look at their hard work, but so far I've had no takers. Next week is the last week of Dinovember (BOO!), and I realized between testing and library inventory, I'll only see each class once-ish in December. I was at first bummed about this, but then I realized how much cheaper and easier planning will be. SO I've already decided what we're doing for that one meeting, and I gotta say, I'm already in love with 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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