Olympic Maker Week!!
The last full week of each month is our maker week. The students really look forward to this all month. The theme for our February maker week was the Winter Olympics! Here are a few of the activities that students did.
Creating Lego flags and Lego ski hills
Coloring in the countries participating in the winter olympics on our world map using an Atlas
Drawing athletes and country flags
Completing a curling "challenge". The students had to design and build a curling "stone" that they could slide to hit the target.
Coding the Sphero to do an "ice skating" routine
Students were also able to use the Osmos and record themselves reading books aloud to share with younger students through Flipgrid.
It was such a fun maker week!
Rebecca Caudill Voting Party
We had quite a few students read three or more of the Rebecca Caudill Award books and attend our voting party! Students voted for their favorite books, had snacks, and played a Kahoot game based on the books. The winning books were (tie) Drowned City and Beneath.
Happy Reading!
Valentine's Day, love, kindness, and books!
What is love? What does it feel like? What does it look like? Most of our classes this week heard the book Love by Matt de la Pena. In this beautiful book, the author shows us many ways that love looks like. Sometimes love is obvious like when we spend time with loved ones. Other times, love is not so obvious.
After reading the book, students wrote what love means to them. They had so many great ideas!
This week we also kicked off the McHenry Public Library Book Madness Tournament! The theme this year is "Clash of the Genres". Which book will win? Stay tuned! A special thank you to the McHenry Public Library for organizing the tournament.
Happy Reading!
How can we tell if the websites we use are trustworthy?
This week, our fifth grade students finished a fun activity locating information and evaluating websites. The students were given a list of ten unbelievable and amazing animal facts from the book Two Truths and Lie (we read part of this book out loud several weeks ago). Nine of the facts on the list were true and one was a fake and it was up to the students to be detectives to find the fake one. The students worked in pairs using an iPad to determine which one of the ten facts was fake. Some of the facts on the list include "some octopuses have three hearts", "scorpions can survive being frozen inside a block of ice", and "bats can have sparkly poop".
Here is the link to the facts we used.
While students were searching for the information, we discussed the importance of checking who the author of the website is. Is the person or organization who published the information an expert? Can we trust them? To determine this, we need to look past the information that is given on the Google results page and actually click on the link provided to find where the information is coming from.
Evaluating websites can be a dry activity but with an interesting topic, it can be fun. The students were so engaged during this activity and one fifth grade boy said "I LOVE library days!".
In other news...
Many of our younger students heard the book One Day in the Eucalyptus, Eucalyptus Tree.
In this Monarch Award book, the boy gets eaten by a snake. Inside the snake's belly, the boy encourages the snake to eat more and more animals until finally, the snake is so full that he burps all of the animals out. The students connected this book to the traditional story about the old woman swallowing bigger and bigger animals and also to The Mitten. We will be voting for our favorite Monarch Award book in March!
In PreK, we learned all about penguins!
Happy Reading!
World Read Aloud Day!
This week, we celebrated World Read Aloud Day for the entire week! Reading aloud is so important that every child should be read aloud to every single day. When children hear books read aloud, they learn new vocabulary, learn about text structure, learn new concepts, learn to love reading, and they learn so much more. World Read Aloud Day is a special day to highlight the importance of reading aloud to children.
Most classes heard the amazing book After the Fall: How Humpty Dumpty Got Back Up Again by Dan Santat.
This is a fabulous story that teaches us that we need to follow our dreams and not be afraid to try again if we fail. This book has a surprise ending and I loved seeing the students' faces light up when they realize what happens at the end. One second grade student said, "I did NOT see that coming!"
After reading the book, many of our third and fourth grade students recorded themselves reading a book aloud using Flipgrid. We then shared the Flipgrid with our younger (PK-1) friends so they can enjoy hearing stories read aloud by their older friends. The older students really had fun reading doing this. Many worked as pairs to read the Elephant and Piggie books using the different voices.
Finally, Mrs. Ellis's class had a special opportunity to Skype with an author on World Read Aloud Day (Thursday)! Many authors volunteer their time on this special day to Skype with students and share a love of reading. We Skyped with author Beth Ferry and she read to us one of her books: Land Shark.
After reading the book, Beth answered some of our questions about being an author and we learned so much about the writing process. Beth was so enthusiastic and very inspirational.
What a fun week in the library!!
