Teaching week Sept 29 - Oct 3:
- 1st and 2nd graders prepared for Fire Safety and interacted with our local fire department - 2nd graders are working on their writing, so we wrote thank you letters to the firefighters. Their thoughts were sometimes humorous, sometimes heartfelt, and all around endearing
- 3rd Graders are still getting oriented with our genre-fied library so they worked in teams on a scavenger hunt - not only did it get students moving and talking, it was an insightful assessment for me to see how well they comprehend genres & how they search for their books
- 4th and 5th graders got a taste of "flipped instruction" and started on something that has long been a goal of mine: writing peer reviews on our library books. After hours of teaching myself (from the students' perspectives) how to enable them to create their own accounts on the Destiny catalog, placing a hold, and writing a review, I decided that recording the steps using Screencastify would be the best way to walk them through it. This tool let me talk them click-by-click through the process and freed me up for helping with technical issues or students who fell behind. It also saved me from having to repeat myself 9x over the week! This was a very successful lesson and every student ultimately created an account, searched for books in the catalog, placed holds, and wrote a review on a book. The previous teaching week was Banned Books Week, so they drafted their review during that lesson, and just needed to type it into Destiny. I'm glad I set it up so reviews needed to be approved because some of the students haven't learned yet not to give spoilers to book! Who wants to know that Old Yeller will "make you cry and cry and never want to read again" - eek! Below is the Screencast I created and used for this lesson...
At the end of the week, I found out that our PTO will be funding the "titlepeek" upgrade so the students will not see icons of books, but the actual book covers. This will be perfect for making them even more independent, and will encourage even greater use of the catalog. There are so many cool features that I will definitely be doing follow up lessons on that and will post some screencasts of it in the coming weeks!