We're getting ready for our first ever INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE BOOK FAIR! I'm so excited to have had so much input on the materials available for our students, and know that we're supporting a local business. I'll be blogging a LOT about that in the coming weeks as I sort through the logistics and do all kinds of PR for it!
Without planning it to work out this way, many of my week #5 lessons had to with social learning. It was a very active week and took a lot of energy to get through it but when you end each day with this cuteness, it's hard not to be excited about the next round of students! My kinders are still adjusting to the norms of school, and expecting them to sit still at the end of the day (after they come in from recess!) is a challenging task! I decided to search out some kind of dance/movement story and "The Little Old Lady Who Wasn't Afraid of Anything" was perfect. We started with the eBook (thanks to the Tumblebooks subscription our public library provides for us) "Frank was a Monster Who Loved to Dance" - and one student made a connection to Frankenstein! I was so impressed! They I told them THEY get to dance along to a song, as long as they can retell me the story at the end. I found a song version of the book on YouTube, which was perfect for this! We also predicted what all these body parts would turn into - all very authentic literacy skills, but done in a very kid-friendly way. In 1st grade classrooms, students are learning about the Daily 5 and the steps on how to build literacy. One of those 'stations' is reading with a friend so to prepare for Halloween, a big stack of books were waiting and off they went with a friend and a good read! Some books were good fits for the partners, but others were a bit challenging. If the book was too hard, students were instructed to read the PICTURES and made up their own stories. Once they all read their stories, we came back together as a group and answered 3 questions about each book: "WHO is your story about?" "WHERE does it take place?" and "WHAT happened in it?" This way, we covered a lot of great books in just 1 class period! 2nd graders are learning about adjectives and how to describe characters so we gathered some favorites and students worked in teams to come up with posters for our library! We started by watching a clip from Despicable Me ("Look Ma!") and as a class, we came up with ways to describe young Gru, his mom, and Vector together on the white board. They came up with some great adjectives like "curious" and "harsh" and it was great scaffolding to prepare them for their group work. I gave them several books with their character and I saw different methods to tackling the challenge: some students were so familiar with the character that they listed words from the top of their heads, where other groups opened the books and wrote down adjectives directly from the text - what an encouraging thing to see in 2nd graders! The student-made posters will hang in our Everybody section for all students to see in the next few weeks :) 4th and 5th graders were back on Destiny Quest last week learning how to use more tools now that they have their own accounts! Last time they placed holds and wrote book reviews, which went extremely well. I've had some great reviews come in (examples above) and I love that some students are even submitting them over the weekend!!! They are home, on the library catalog, writing about books, on weekends. Hello - what a cool way to see how this has been a useful lesson! Last week we had the iPads and students were shown how to make a "to-read" list on Destiny Quest, so that if they've already used up their limit of holds & are waiting for books to come in, they can still keep a digital list of other books they've been meaning to read. The most popular feature though... adding friends!! You would have thought I had told them they were signing up for Facebook... seriously! They were giddy over adding friends and sending book recommendations to one another. I even got a handful of requests from students so that they can tell me which books they've liked and get electronic recommendations from me :) Be still my heart... So the moral of this week has been that using media for social connections does just as much for literacy building as making them sit silently and read their books. Sure, playing on iPads doesn't "look" like literacy building... but they are making authentic connections with what they're reading, giving opinions on a public forum, sharing recommendations with peers, and learning more about how to use the information that technology provides for their personal benefit. As for the younger students, who says reading has to be a solo sport?? They covered 10+ books in less than 30 minutes by buddy reading and sharing details of a story - all important factors when it comes to literacy skills.
We're getting ready for our first ever INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE BOOK FAIR! I'm so excited to have had so much input on the materials available for our students, and know that we're supporting a local business. I'll be blogging a LOT about that in the coming weeks as I sort through the logistics and do all kinds of PR for it!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorBeach girl. Archives
January 2021
Categories
All
|