All About Me in 4th grade

We have been working on a really fun project in 4th grade called all about me.  The students filled out an autobiographical poem generator and took a screen shot.  Then they took a real picture of themselves, created an avatar and then used a collage maker on the web called befunky to create a collage.  After a few embellishments they turned out great!

Making Our Mark in a Magazine!!!

In third grade we always start out the year talking about magazines. We look at what kind of information we may find and what is unique about a magazine.  As part of our learning process we have created our own magazine covers.  We have learned about things such as tag lines and featured headlines that entice us to purchase magazines. Here are a few we created using photobooth and big huge labs.

Fontastic First Graders!!!!

Today I was working with 1st graders in the lab.  We are talking about fonts and what that means.  There was a lot of new vocabulary to learn like  font, size, formatting palette, highlighting.  I am also impressed how they retained our discussions of several of the keys we talked about like the return, shift and spacebar. They even used the edit menu to copy and paste.
Here is their proud work using fonts!

Now I would call that FONTASTIC!

5th grade collaborative fairy tales

We are working on collaborative stories and what better than using fairy tales to teach kids about collaborating.  In our assignment each student is in a group of 3.  #1 starts out the story with once upon a time like every good fairytale. #1 then shares that document out to #2 and #3. Then each student is assigned a part to collaborate on.  #1 chooses the characters, #2 choose the where and #3 chooses the when and then we go back to a problem , some dialogue and some other events and voila a story is born. What's even better is that when they are creating this story they are all doing it simultaneously with google docs.  Even the kids are amazed on how slick it works to collaborate on one document.  

Eve bookfair 2014!!!

This year's theme for the scholastic bookfair "Sir Readalot's castle enter the kingdom of books". All the students were excited about the bookfair.  They have been previewing books earlier this week and today started the big event. Such great support from all the parents and volunteers at Eve!

Now these are some dedicated volunteers

Wow now that is a bookfair!!!

Captured at the bookfair!

MEMO/ITEM conference

Last week I had the privilege of  attending what used to be the MEMO (Minnesota Educational Media Organization) annual fall conference and what is now called the ITEM (Information and Technology Educators of Minnesota). 
It was an exhausting and very informative conference.  My colleague Cathy Knutson and I spent several hours preparing for not just 1 but 2 presentations.  One called "Digitivity" or appsmashing which included activities that we have been doing with our students in the media center the last 2 years.  The other was "Promoting your library" .  We all have been feeling the cutbacks in our programs so we were trying to show possible ways of getting the word out of the importance of libraries.
We were also able to attend some great sessions on genrifying your library, new learning spaces, makerspaces and new ebooks available.  So much information in a short time.

EVE walkathon

On friday Sept. 20 Eastview Elementary conducted a walk-a-thon.

The turnout was amazing.  So many parents, students and teachers supporting our school.  Even better we reached our goal!