- Can you recommend a good book for me?
- Do you have any books about real ghosts?
- Can we research our person for the biography project at home?
- Recommendations for the two of us? We want to read the same book.
- Where are the Bad Kitty books?
- Do you have any books on ATV’s or motorbikes?
- How do I change a book from my Currently Reading to Have Read shelves in My Quest?
- I went to the Seekonk library and got out a bunch of books and realize I have high expectations for what I read. Do you have any good fantasy chapter books?
- Is The Blessing Cup by Patricia Polacco historical fiction or nonfiction?
- Can I use a Google search result for my paper if it is an “ad”?
- Can you put the Philadelphia Eagles book aside for me when it comes in?”
- Can you see I lost a tooth? - kindergartener :)
- Do you have a 2015 almanac?
- Can you help me find a good fantasy book?
- I’m having trouble finding a book. Can you help me find something good?
- Do you have another book about Helen Keller?
- Do you have a short fantasy book for my book talk?
- Is there a Coretta Scott King book here?
- Is Cinderella a fantasy book?
- Do you have a book about sea monsters?
- Do you have any Lego books?
- Where are the princess books?
A few weeks ago, I decided to write down all of the questions students ask me during our checkout time. Book Look and checkout is always a whirlwind of activity at every grade level. At the end of the day, when I reflect on how the day went, it's not always easy to remember the details of checkout time. Usually somewhere between three and twelve students ask me questions about books within a ten minute time period. This was a great exercise to document the range of questions students have during Book Look in the library. It's encouraging to see how students are interested in exploring a wide variety of topics.
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Students in grade five are presenting their SMORE pet flyers this week. Their job was to act as a pet shelter employee in charge of marketing the animals up for adoption. They worked in groups to come up with the animal, find an image, cite their image source, write a short blurb about the animal, and create a SMORE flyer with all of their information. This flyer was a culmination of an earlier research lesson about searching online for information. Read more about that in a previous post. The pet adoption flyers were adorable. Students worked well together to come up with ideas and enjoyed looking for cute pet photos and designing their flyer themes. Read about Oreo and Nutter Butter below for an example of their work.
After reading Jack Prelutsky's Scranimals, students in 2nd grade wrote their own Scranimal poem by combining a plant and animal into a new creature and writing a poem about it. See examples below. Tangerape (tangerine & ape) Swinging through the treetops is a fragile tangerape. You barely get to see one, despite their planned escape. Their body is all orange but they have good grip on hands. That hold on tight, very tight, just like rubber bands. Seachark (seaweed, chimp, & shark) Watch out for a seachark, he's very bad to meet. You should get away before you are his treat. He can go on land. He does not have a band. So never ever go near a seachark.
Third graders have completed their diamante (diamond) puppet poem performances. Students worked in groups to research a famous person. They gathered words from that research and created a diamante poem. Students performed their poem aloud with a marionette puppet they made in art. Diamante puppet poems were shown at the Art Show Medley last week so the whole school community could see our work. If you missed the Art Show Medley, see our YouTube playlist below.
Students in 4th grade read folktale stories from around the world. After making shadow puppets in art class, they rewrote the tales in the form of a script to perform a shadow puppet play in library class. Not only did students have to learn to work together to create the puppets, scripts, and to perform, they also explored Common Core Standards in reading, writing, and speaking and listening (RL.4.1, RL.4.2, W.4.3, SL.4.4). Upon reflection, both the art teacher and myself felt that the process of taking a folktale and transforming it into a shadow puppet play was extremely valuable in combining art, reading, writing, and speaking skills as well as fostering a creative community where students are excited and proud to share their work with peers and family. We will show the shadow puppet plays as part of our upcoming Art Show Medley on May 7th. All shadow puppet plays are posted on our YouTube Channel below:
Students in grade 5 are finishing up a research unit on a pet theme. As a starter, I read a few pet shelter-related excerpts from Gaby Lost and Found by Angela Cervantes. We talked about using key words and how being specific helps improve your search results. (I used this Common Sense Media lesson). First students used WorldBook and Searchasaurus on Askri.org to find general information about pets. Then, they worked in groups to generate their own question about pets and used the Google search engine to answer the question. This was much more difficult than I thought it would be. It turns out, based on a writing reflection on the unit, that many students felt the same. Over half of the students said it was harder than they thought to find information on Google. One student said, "Finding information using Google is really hard. We looked forever, and couldn't find our answer." Another student commented, "It was a little harder than I thought because of our question and all of the websites." And finally, "you had to use very specific words and even then it had random results." The unit turned out to be a lesson in adaptation. Many groups ended up changing their original question so that they could get the information they needed. And while I pushed askri.org and other sources so that students turn to those sources first when they go to middle school, I think the Google search helped students to realize the vast information landscape that is out there. Now, students are presenting their information by doing a television-style interview with their group. Despite their challenges finding information quickly, they were able to answer their questions and are having fun creatively sharing that with their peers. As a final end of year project, students will create their own adoption advertisement for a pet using the online flyer website, smore.com.
We have completed another Legos in the Library after school program, this time with grades K-2. We began each day with a "handful of bricks" activity where students used the same 30 bricks to build something different each class given a 10 minute time frame. Then we read a story and built a Lego creation inspired by that story. We read and built around the following stories and themes:
The Adventures of Beekle by Dan Santat - Imaginary Creatures Clink by Kelly DiPucchio - Robot Friends How to Bicycle to the Moon to Plant Sunflowers by Mordicai Gerstein - Vehicles Mr. Wuffles - Alien Space Vehicles See our slideshow below of students' creations:
Who doesn't love a robot? Kindergarteners listened to the early reader chapter book Rabbit & Robot: The Sleepover by Cece Bell. Students enjoyed hearing about Rabbit & Robot's adventures and I got to practice reading in a robot voice. We talked about the character traits of Rabbit & Robot and retold what happened in each chapter. Students also created their own robot buddy using geometric shapes cut out from construction paper. See more robots below.
The robot story was part of a larger unit on early reader books that feature friends. I've separated early readers in our library to make it easier for emerging reader students to find books that they can actually read. In addition to Rabbit & Robot: The Sleepover, we read Mouse & Mole: Winter Wonderland by Wong Herbert Yee, Sam and the Firefly by P.D. Eastman (and watched a cool firefly video for students who had never seen a real firefly that you can see below), and Flora & Flamingo by Molly Idle.
Fireflies
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