Monsters in the Library???!!!!!

This fall our theme for the bookfair was Monsters.  The bookfair was a huge success thanks to Amy Solinger and Heidi Weist plus many others. The kids love it and are always so excited to see what great books there is out there to purchase. We are so lucky to have great volunteers and such a supportive PTO. Thanks!!!!!

          

 

4th grade projects with beanie babies

I love to make learning fun but sometimes it is just plain hard to teach a let's face it a not so interesting topic like the dewey decimal system.  So I decided to use beanie babies.  I had several just sitting around my house from my own children and I had some donated.  I decided hey these might be really useful to teach kids about non-fiction.  So we took a picture of the beanie by themselves, one of them with the student and one reading a book about themselves.  The students did some research about their animal using the destiny app to find their book about their animal and had to come up with 3 interesting facts .  They put the pictures in an imovie presentation recorded their 3 facts and then used an app called Chatterkid to create a talking animal describing where they would find them on the shelf.  It was a great activity to get kids to find the book and get a better understanding of non-fiction.
Scroll down to the bottom to see our finished projects!
Apps we used for this project

Here is some of our finished products!

Kindergarten & pete the cat

We have been studying one of my newest favorite book characters "Pete the Cat".  Pete is a big hit among the young students and he even has some groovy tunes to go along with his books. Take a listen
Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons" Song

 

Here are some of my kindergartners creating their own groovy glasses on pictures of themselves using draw free

I love to read 2015

This year we decided to move "i love to read month " to march.  I always try to decorate the media center with a fun theme for the month.  This year it was Dr. Seuss loves to Read.  I filled some bags up with stickers, bools, erasers, pencils, bookmarks etc.  The students had the opportunity to answer trivia questions each week and then put their name in for a weekly drawing to get a goody bag.  The kids loved it and it was a great way to celebrate the month and fun as well.  Some of my past themes have included pirates, carnival, Theatre/Award theme, western, Chinese New Year etc.  Dr.  Seuss is one of my favorites and the kids too I'm sure.

3rd grade QR codes

What a fun way to introduce kids on how to use and create a QR codes other than creating an author poster using pic collage.  The students choose an author to research.  They find books by the author, a picture of the author and then create their QR code.  Here are a few examples:

 

Lois Ehlert and Colorforms

In Kindergarten we have been talking about shapes and how Lois Ehlert uses lots of shapes to create her stories in her books.  We used the app Colorforms to create shape animals.  The kids loved it!!!  We also talked about how Lois Ehlert is from Wisconsin.  We found out almost everyone has a Wisconsin connection.

Check out this cute video of kindergarteners and their creations!

3rd grade Cinquain

We started our cinquain project this late fall and are just finishing up.  The 3rd graders started used their google documents to create a cinquain poem where they learned about poetry, word processing skills like font, size,  alignment and placing graphics.  A fun project for 3rd grade.

Check out Mrs. Verkinderen's class book.
Mrs. Lemaster's class Mr. Mosher's class Mrs. Liekis' class

Caldecott Winners!!

In 2nd grade we start talking about what a Caldecott medal is and about the whole process illustrators go through to create books.  The Caldecott medal is given to the picture book with the best pictures for the previous publishing year.  This is fun to talk about with the kids and see if they can figure out what type of medium the artists have used for their illustrations.  We conducted our own mock vote so we can see if we came up with the same winner.   The difficulty is in choosing who might be nominated for the award.  There is no published nomination list so I look at different websites that list possibilities.
Stay tuned for our projects that will be finished the end of February!

The students voted and according to their top 3 this is what they chose.  I also had my 3rd graders vote since they had done this project last year.

1.  Beekle

2.  Draw !

3.  Sam and Dave Dig a Hole

The actual winner was:

Honor books included:

 

 

I guess you could say the kids know how to pick them.  Stay tuned for the student projects coming up later this month!

Kindergarten with Mercer Mayer

Kindergarten has been busy this year being in the computer lab but now we are trying out our ipads.  They did great as they learned about Mercer Mayer and some of his books.  We picked an app called just me and my mom to introduce kindergarten students to the world of books on the ipad.  This one was great because it was interactive.  I had them click on the option to read to myself then they could tap on each word to read to them and tap on other things in the pages to see words.  There was also the challenge of finding a frog character on every page.  Having fun while they learn.

All about 1st graders!!

Every year I like to have the students create something that gives me a little insight to some of their favorites. We used a program in the lab called kidspiration where I created a template and they filled in some of their favorite things. My favorite part of this project is where they create the small picture of themselves. Adorable! This project is a good one for developing the use of the paint tools, resizing graphics, changing font size and type, and dragging and dropping.