April Recap from the Library

 I know it's already May and I'm just doing a recap of April, but this year has been a little extra crazy! I have not been doing a great job at keeping up with my blog this year. 

Poetry 

We started the month with a poetry breakout. Our students here love ❤️ the Breakout boxes! They love the digital ones but they extra love getting to solve and open the physical boxes and locks. For this breakout, they worked in teams using clues with different types of poems, poetic devices, and figurative language. It was lots of fun and a good end of unit review for the 7th grade classes. 

Later in the month, some of the 7th grade classes came back to the library to create Blackout Poetry with discarded book pages. I was amazed at their creative creations!! 

Text Evidence

I was chatting with a 6th grade English teacher who brought up that her students needed some more practice with Text Evidence and writing SRQs for the STAAR test. I suggested we come up with a fun game or stations, and we ended up with a Scoot game where they went to different tables to read a short passage. They had to use the passage to answer questions and write an SRQ stating text evidence to answer questions. It was helpful to hold this scoot game in the library because there is more room to move around than in a middle school classroom. 

Historical Fiction

One of my favorite units that I get to collaborate with 8th grade teachers on is the historical fiction unit. It is one of my favorite genres, so it is really easy for me to book talk. We discuss what makes a book historical fiction, I do a few book talks, then students browse the tables where I have the books set out by time period. 

Every year I realize I need to purchase more books in other time periods besides holocaust. Do you every realize how many middle grade and YA historical fiction books are set in WW II and discuss the holocaust. I need some authors to write about some other time eras so I can up my collection. 

After choosing their book, students will read with historical lense, research the setting and time to determine if it is historically accurate, then present their findings. 

6th grade research 

Our school campus has recently been moving toward becoming an IB MYP school. Part of the requirement is to have a cross curricular unit in each grade level. Students have a summative assessment and must present their projects. The best part of IB is that the librarian is very involved! 

6th grade's unit has taken place all year long beginning with a grade level read and participating in the Global Read Aloud. 6th grade read the book THIRST which fit in perfectly with their unit over Water. Students were able to research the water crisis in Mumbai while reading the book. The second semester, English classes read the book LONG WALK TO WATER, which is set in another country, but again about water shortages. 

For the summative assessment, students must research a developing country, determine the challenge that country faces, and use the UN Sustainable Development Goals to find a solution. Students will create a video, comic strip, or poster to present their findings. 

I put together the directions, rubrics, and resources for them to use in a Wakelet. Each class came to the library for a review on how to use the resources and how to cite their sources. Students started their research with me and took Cornell Notes over their chosen developing country. 

Building Arguments with 8th Grade

 8th grade will be starting the Persuasive writing unit soon, so the teachers approached me about reviewing the databases the students will be using. I decided to use Gale Opposing Viewpoints to practice building an argument. 

First, we did a quick review over how to use the database, what was included, and how they can find and cite their information. 

To model looking at both sides of an issue to build their argument, we looked up the issue Fast Fashion. I asked the question why we need to look at both sides in order to build an effective argument. It took every class a little bit to get to the reason, but we did get there. I needed the students to understand that when we are writing a persuasive article, we are not trying to persuade peope that already think the same way we do, we are persuading people that think differently. If we look at their side of the issue and the reasons they think the way they do, we can build better arguments. 

Group work 

The next step after modeling is to get in groups to look up their issue. For time sake, since I only have the classes for 45 minutes, I assigned each group a topic in Opposing Viewpoints. I also assigned them a slide number so they knew which slide to work on. 

Students recieved an editable version of the google slide. *I made a copy of this for each class coming to the library.* On their slide, they write the two sides of the issue giving the two strongest arguments for each. Then, after reading both sides of the issue, students write their opinion stating reasons and support from the articles. 

Conversations 

This activity sparked some really good conversations about hearing both sides. Several of the students mentioned that they had never thought of certain issues in this way after reading the opposite side of what they believed. 

Feel free to grab the template to do this activity with your students.