Battle of the Books!

Every year, one of the biggest highlights of our library program is our Battle of the Books tournaments!  We just completed our SIXTH year and our program has grown so much since when we first started.  We began with just two grade levels, 3rd and 4th, and one tournament.  This year, we had a third grade tournament, a 4/5th grade tournament, and a 6-8th grade tournament.  We also had two staff teams and the winner of those two teams battled the winner of the 6-8th grade tournament.  A total of 60 students, 10 staff team members, and 11 staff coaches participated this year!

How does it work?  Students form teams of 4-6 members.  There are 10 book titles for each level of battle.  The students work together to try to get each of the books read by at least two team members.  The teams also each have one coach to help keep them on track.  This year, our teams were formed, and the students began reading the books in December.  

During the battles, the teams take turns answering questions about the books.  The questions are always in the form of "In which book..." and the answer is always the title and author of one of the books.  It sounds easy, but it's not!!  Many of the questions focus on small details in each of the books.

Here were some of the highlights from this year's battles:

This was the first year we separated 3rd grade and had them do their own battle and it worked out beautifully!  The students were able to read books that were a little more manageable and ease into the experience.  We had four teams.  The two winners from Monday's preliminary rounds were Team Girl Power and Fiction Addiction.  Team Girl Power won the final, but not by very much!

At the 4/5th grade level, we had three 4th grade teams and two fifth grade teams.  The Rocking Bookworms 4th grade team beat the Flying Battle Books by just two points to make it into the final round!  The 5th grade team CBLC Bridge to BOB beat the Japanese Dwarfs to advance to the finals.  In the final round, it was tied for a while but The Rocking Bookworms pulled ahead for the victory!

We had three teams in the 6-8th grade battle.  During the preliminary rounds, the 6th grade team, Fantastic Five, beat both the 7th grade team (Jose Upton Liked Unicorns Too Much) and the 8th grade team (Word Nerds).  The final battle ended up being between the Fantastic Five and the Word Nerds with the Word Nerds pulling out a victory!

It was fun to watch our two staff teams compete against each other!  I'm sure it's not easy to compete against your peers with other peers watching (Hmm, must be what it feels like among our student teams!!).  Team "No Comparison to This Staff of Harrison" fought hard, but our junior high staff team won for the second year in a row!  They then went on to beat the 8th grade winning team.  Congratulations to ALL who participated in any way!  

A HUGE thank you to all of the staff members who helped helped out as coaches!  We couldn't do this without them!  Also, thank you to my co-director Mrs. Lachel and our principal, Mrs. Huff for all of their help!  Thanks to Caitlin Bergan from the McHenry Public Library for help with writing questions and during some of the preliminary rounds! Thanks to Dale for help setting up and cleaning up!  Finally, thanks to ALL of the Harrison staff for being flexible during these last few days!  You are all AWESOME!

Book Trailers

Our fifth grade students recently finished creating their book trailers and they turned out great!  A book trailer is an advertisement for a book...like a movie trailer.  For this project, students worked alone or in pairs.  After selecting a recently read book that they wanted to promote, the students then created a storyboard to organize their thoughts.  

Once the storyboard was created, the students then used the iPads to select several pictures from the Internet to go with their stories.  They learned how to use Google search tools to modify their search results to include only pictures that are labeled for noncommercial reuse.

After selecting pictures to use, some of the students used the ComicBook! app to make speech bubbles with the words they wanted to say.  Then, these images were loaded into iMovie to create the finished project.  Other students simply loaded the pictures directly into iMovie and added words there.  Finally, music was added along with a credits slide.

Our students learned many skills by making book trailers.  They learned how to determine important ideas from the text and convey these ideas in a creative way.  The students practiced using a graphic organizer to organize their thoughts.  They learned how to modify their Google search to include images that were acceptable to use and how to cite their image sources.  Finally, the students had fun using the iPads and the ComicBook! and iMovie apps! 

Here are a few of our trailers:

The completed book trailers have been loaded into Destiny, our library catalog system.  When students are looking for books to read in Destiny, they can watch trailers created by Harrison students!  The book trailers can also be found on our library website:  https://sites.google.com/site/hsd36libraryresources/homepage/book-trailers-2015.

Enjoy and happy reading!!

LEGO Club!

Earlier in February, we started an after school LEGO club at Harrison School!  We've had two meetings already and so far, it's been fantastic!!

 

Why did we decide to start this club?  There are so many benefits to building with LEGOS.  When students build with LEGOS, they have improved fine motor skills.  They learn cooperation and problem solving skills.  They have increased creativity and a boost in confidence.  And, most important, the students have FUN while all of this learning is taking place!!  Building with LEGOS is the perfect STEM activity for elementary age students.

Logistics of our club: In order to purchase our LEGOS, we started a Donor's Choose campaign.  Local families and strangers from far away donated to our project which became fully funded in January.  Also, two families saw our Donor's Choose project and decided to donate a VERY large amount of LEGOS that they already had.  Combined with the LEGOS purchased through Donor's Choose project, we had more than enough to start our club!

Our club meets two times per month after school for one hour in the library.  We opened the club up to students in grades 1-4 and we started with 30 members (with 20 more on the waiting list).  After our first meeting, we decided to bump up our numbers to 42 because we realized that we had the space to accommodate more students.  We probably won't be able to add any more because the library is quite full with 42.  For next year, we may split up the club into smaller grades (i.e. grades 1-2, 3-4) so that we can accommodate more students.  During our first meeting, we had the students decide on appropriate rules to help our club run smooth.  We also begin each meeting with a small snack.

Each meeting will have a different theme.  Students can building something related to the theme, or they can build something different.  Our first theme was "build something that flies" and our second theme was "build a creature".  If students decide to build something related to the theme, we will display it on the counter around the circulation desk for all to see until our next meeting.

  

It is amazing to see the students working together, using their creativity, being totally engaged the entire time, and having FUN!!  At the end of our second meeting, we asked the students what they liked about LEGO club so far.  Here are some of their responses:  "being creative" "building with a friend" "the themes" "being able to build anything, not just the theme" and "seeing what everyone else builds".

We can't wait to see all of the great ideas that our students come up with in future meetings!

Mock Caldecott Unit

Welcome back!  For the month of January, our students in grades 2-4 participated in a Mock Caldecott Unit!  For this unit, we read six books that were contenders for the 2015 Caldecott Award.  Then, the students voted for which book they thought should win the award and which books should be the honor (runner-up) book.  Finally, students had to tell why they chose the books that they did.  The six books we read were:

This is the document that the students used to vote with:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wn4NNCU-RfxsFzRSwJmJbVp8hoCtO_dbPjCa6dtb-X0/edit?usp=sharing

We were excited to find out that The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend won the actual Caldecott Award and Sam and & Dave Dig a Hole was an honor book!  These were two of our favorites as well!!

Our friends from Old Bethpage Elementary School in New York are reading the same six books that we read and then we hope to Skype with them at the end of February.  We can't wait to compare notes and see if students in both schools liked the same books!

We will definitely do this unit again next year as there were so many benefits!  Students were exposed to high quality literature.  They had fun reading the stories with a purpose in mind...to rate the books for their illustrations and overall quality.  The students had to justify their choices through writing.  Finally, it was fun seeing which books won for our school and then which books won the actual award!

The Animals' Santa by Jan Brett

This week, our second and third grade classes started a mini author study unit on Jan Brett.  Many of her stories revolve around winter and Christmas so this is the perfect season to learn about Jan Brett and her beautiful books!  We kicked off the unit by reading her brand new book The Animals' Santa.  In this simple, but gorgeous book, the animals are telling Little Snowshoe Rabbit about the Animals' Santa who comes each year to deliver gifts.  Each animal thinks the Animals' Santa must be a different type of animal (bear, moose, etc).  However, Little Snowshoe doesn't believe there is a Santa because none of the animals have ever seen tracks left in the snow from him.  In the end, Little Snowshoe, and all of the rest of the animals, learn just who the Animals' Santa really is!

In classic Jan Brett form, each page in the book has side panels that add to the story.  After reading the book, we learned more about Jan Brett and where she got her inspiration for her story.  Second and third grade is the perfect age for discovering Jan Brett's magic as the students were captivated by the book!  We can't wait to read more of her books, and learn more about her, in the coming weeks! 

Lunch reading: The One and Only Ivan

Last year, I began reading to some of our students during their lunchtime.  The reason I started doing this was because there were some students who were participating in our Battle of the Books program who would have had a difficult time reading some of the books on the list.  At first, the lunch reading was only open to students participating in our Battle of the Books or book club programs.  However, so many other students wanted to listen!!  I knew I was on to something big!

This school year, I opened the program up to anyone who wanted to listen while they ate their lunch.  At our school, students in grades 3, 4, and 5 eat lunch together in two big adjoining rooms.  With the support of our principal and our lunch ladies, we made one of the two rooms my reading room on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.  Any student who was willing to sit quietly and listen to me read while they ate their lunch was invited to eat in my room.  We ended up with over half of our students in grades 3-5 participating!!  Sure, a few had to be removed for talking after repeated warnings, but that was definitely the exception. 

The book I chose was The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate.


If you have not read this book yet, I highly recommend it!  It's loosely based on the true story of a gorilla who was plucked from his home in Africa and placed in a cage in a shopping mall.  After many years, he was finally rescued and sent to the zoo in Atlanta.  The writing is beautiful and the story is compelling. 

This book turned out to be the perfect book for this read aloud for many reasons.  First of all, the story is engaging.  The students love animal stories and especially ones that have happy endings.  Also, this book has very short, one to three page, sections.  This was perfect because we only had about 10-12 minutes of reading per day.  Since the sections were so short, we never had to end in the middle of one.  This book is on two of the Illinois reader's choice award lists: Bluestem and Rebecca Caudill.  Finally, even though it took us over two months to read, the students never lost interest.

We finished reading the story last week and the students clapped and cheered at the end!  What a great journey we all took together.  Today, I read Ivan: The Remarkable True Story of the Shopping Mall Gorilla by Katherine Applegate.


This beautiful picture book was the perfect wrap-up to our reading time together as it tells the story about the real Ivan.

I can't wait until after winter break when we begin our next book.  Stay tuned to find out what it is!

Happy Thanksgiving!

This week, in celebration of Thanksgiving, some of our third and fourth grade classes heard "Thank You, Sarah: The Woman Who Saved Thanksgiving" by Laurie Halse Anderson during library time.



I love to read lesser known, more obscure facts, about historical events!  Did you know that we almost lost Thanksgiving??  The celebration of Thanksgiving was declining in the early 1700's.  In this picture book, we learn about a woman named Sarah Hale who lobbied to have Thanksgiving become a national holiday.  After Sarah wrote to four different U.S. Presidents asking them to sign it into law, and they all refused, Sarah didn't give up!  The country was in shambles when she wrote to President Abraham Lincoln suggesting that a national holiday giving thanks was just what the country needed.  President Lincoln and agreed and Sarah's dream came true!  Not only did our students learn about Sarah Hale, but they also learned about the power of the pen and to never give up!!  We really enjoyed this story!

Happy Thanksgiving! :)