Week of December 17th

Battle of the Books!

This week, we kicked off our Battle of the Books program with our kick-off assemblies!  We will have three Battle of the Books levels this year: third grade, fourth/fifth grade, sixth-eighth grade.  



At our kick-off assemblies, we introduced the books for the year through booktalks and book trailers and explained the program to our students.  For our 6-8th grade kick-off, we tried something new.  Instead of simply booktalking the books, we played a Kahoot game and the students loved it!  We created ten-word summaries, emoji summaries, or summary tweets of each book and then students had to guess which book the summary was for.

New this year, we now have many of the books available as ebooks and audiobooks.  Here is a video that explains how to access the books.

It's so exciting to see so many students already reading the books!  Several students have told me that they already finished one of the books and I think we will have an awesome Battle of the Books year!!


Holiday Makerspace

After checking out books this week, students were able to participate in a variety of different holiday makerspace activities.  Students made holiday bookmarks, created Christmas cards to give to others, and folded fortune tellers that told "kindness" fortunes.  One of the most popular activities was coding on the iPads.  Students explored the Grinch Hour of Code and Google's Santa Tracker Code Lab.  Both were easy to use and worked great on the iPads.

Rubik's Cubes

For the past six weeks, we borrowed a set of 50 Rubik's Cubes from You Can Do the Cube.  Students had so much fun solving one side of the cube to complete various mosaics!

The final week, we challenged students to try to learn how to solve the entire Rubik's Cube.  Junior high students were invited to come to the library during their recess and Miss Mueller and I showed them how to do it.  Several students were able to solve it and they were SO excited!  We returned all 50 solved and were placed in a drawing to win a set to keep.  Fingers crossed!!

Happy Holidays and Happy Reading!