Seuss Week Recap

I'm pretty sure that I was insane when I decided to host my book fair the same week of Read Across America and the same week that our school held Family Literacy Night that, you guessed it, I was in charge of planning. Needless to say, I survived and that is behind us. Anyway, even though I barely survived, the week was a huge success!! By the way, during this week we also had a fire drill, tornado drill, and lock down drill. CRAZY!!!

Read Across America and Dr. Seuss Day is one of my all time favorite weeks of the school year, second only to Spring Break!! We started the week off with Green Eggs and Ham day with everyone dressing in green. The cafeteria staff even got in on the fun and served green eggs and ham for breakfast. We also had hat day, mustache day, and college shirt day. One day was all focused on ONE FISH, TWO FISH, RED FISH, BLUE FISH. Again, the cafeteria staff got in on the fun and served colored goldfish to the students, and gifted a copy of the book to the library.

For fun, we held a Battle of the Books, Dr. Seuss style. We started off with 16 books, 8 classics and 8 beginner books. The first 3 rounds were held during Read Across America week, but we are now down to 2 books! THE LORAX and GREEN EGGS AND HAM. Tomorrow is the last day to vote, so we will soon find out the winner.

The book fair was a huge hit, our students always get SUPER excited about the book fair. We reached our goal and sold over 1,300 books! We also held a coin drive to buy books for the teachers' classroom libraries. I made it into a contest between the houses and told students that the house that raised the most money would have the library decorated in their colors. AMABLE was the winner, and today I purchased a ton of green decorations to go in the library tomorrow. 

I was amazed at the amount of money our students and parents donated to our coin drive. It was enough for me to purchase every teacher 3 or more books for the classroom library. 

Literacy night was a big success! Families came out and enjoyed numerous activities, including story time with Cat in the Hat and Thing 1 and Thing 2. There was a bookmark making station, as well as a hat creation station. QR codes with Seuss books were scattered around the building, and a DR. Seuss trivia. 

Making Inferences with FREEDOM SUMMER

Wiles, Deborah. FREEDOM SUMMER. illustrated by Jerome
Lagarrigue. Aladdin. 2005. 

Last week, one of the 3rd grade teachers and I were discussing picture books dealing with Civil Rights, segregation,  and the Jim Crow Laws. I asked her what skill they needed more practice on, and when she said 'inferences', I immediately knew to get the book FREEDOM SUMMER by Deborah Wiles.

Flex Schedule is so funny, once one teacher comes to me with an idea, a lot of the teachers want in on the lesson too. So, I ended up teaching this lesson with all 3rd and 4th grade classes.

With 3rd grade, I started out reviewing inferences, and how we use the author's clues and our schema together to make an inference. The author does not always tell the reader everything, the reader has to dig deeper into the text to infer what is happening. This makes it more fun for the reader!! While reading the story, I stopped at certain parts of the story, and students told me their schema, then made an inference. While I read, the teacher filled out the anchor chart with the students' responses.

After reading the story, pairs took a Chromebook to a table, and opened up the padlet I created before class. Pairs discussed what they thought the theme of the story was using our inferences as a basis.

4th grade teachers wanted to focus more on theme, character change, and emotions. One of the 4th grade teachers came up with a note-taking sheet students filled out while I read the book. The plan was to have the students answer the questions making a video using the app, RECAP. However, it wasn't working that day, so students made their notes in preparation to make their video.

If you have not read FREEDOM SUMMER to your students, I highly recommend it! I read the book 8 times last week, and still teared up at the end each time. One class clapped at the end of the story, it was very moving, and it created GREAT conversation with the students. Especially our GT and academically advanced students that we have here.

All these lessons in the library made for a super busy week, but it was worth every busy minute!

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Bluebonnet Voting Party

One of my favorite book lists is the Texas Bluebonnet List put out every year by the Texas Library Association. It is a selection of 20 books, fiction and nonfiction, chosen by librarians and teachers in the state of Texas.  Students in 3rd through 6th grade who read 5 or more of the books from the list get to vote on the winner of the Texas Bluebonnet Award.

In my library, we made the Bluebonnet list a huge deal! Students that read 5 or more are invited to join the Bluebonnet club. I host a special party on our voting day, complete with decorations and cookies.

The winning book for Texas will not be announced until sometime in February, however, I counted the votes from our students, and ROLLER GIRL by Victoria Jamieson came in first place. The students don't know it yet, but I have a signed copy of this book that will be raffled off at our Reading Night in March!! 

I can't wait to hear the announcement next month for the winning BlueBonnet Award Book! 

Now, I'm off to plan a Making Inferences lesson for 3rd grade next week and Civil Rights Movement for 4th grade.  

Mock Caldecott 2017

I started late this year, but I decided to do a Mock Caldecott election with the Kinder and first grade students. Last week we discussed the Caldecott Award and Caldecott Honor and that the awards are for the best picture book.  We discuss how the illustrations often give more detail and are very important to the story.

I showed them last year's winners and read Finding Winnie and Last Stop on Market Street. I pointed out the different techniques that the illustrator used, specifically the cut paper technique that Christian Robinson uses in Last Stop on Market Street.




















I then chose the books we will be voting on for our Mock Caldecott. I follow a few book gurus on Twitter that helped me make me decision for out books, such as John Schu and Travis Jonkers.  I decided this year, since we are starting late, we won't have a lot of books to choose from. We will start with only six.

After deciding on the books for this year, I created a ballot that the students can fill out after we read each book.

This week we read Samson in the Snow, which is about a woolly mammoth named Samson, who loves dandelions and desparately wants a friend. He encounters a red bird who wants to cheer up her friend whose favorite color is yellow. A blizzard comes, and Samson begins to worry about the little red bird, so he wanders off to find her. The picture book is wonderful for making predictions, and the illustrations add so much detail to the story.

Next week, we will read another picture book that just might be the 2017 winner!  (p,s. Even though the real winner is announced next week, I won't tell my kids until we are done. LOL!) 

I can't end the week without letting you see my Jamberry manicure that held up all week long and still looks fabulous! And a sneak peek of what we will read next week. 

4th Grade Immigration Collage Project

This week at the Hillside Library, 4th grade students are learning about immigration and the effects it has on people and a country. Students chose a country to research and find out about the immigrants from that country. There project was to find and choose images that depict immigrants from their chosen country. Then put together a collage of images/photographs. 

The first step, was to learn more about the country where the immigrants come from. Students used books and online databases to find information. The 4th grade teacher set up the instructions for the project in Google Classroom, along with some of the websites they could use to research. I reviewed how to find information in the online encyclopedia and how to cite our sources. 

The next step was to find the images. I showed the students the online database for photographs we use in our district, Britannica Image Quest. The classroom teacher and I went over how to download the image into the students' Google Drive, as well as how to create the citations for the image. 

The biggest benefit of the flex schedule this year is having two teachers (myself and the classroom teacher) helping students with technology and steps of research. It has made a huge difference in the quality of work. 

Friday Wrap up, New Year, and SNOW!

We are already a week into the year 2017! We have only been back at school for 4 days, and the library has already circulated over 1,100 books. It makes me so happy to have such avid readers here. 

No time was wasted this week, and everyone dove right into working and researching. Third grade is learning about landforms, so the teacher and I collaborated on ways to make it more meaningful. She found a passport, and I provided the lesson on using Google Earth and our online World Atlas. Students were given the task to find information on different types of landforms, then to locate famous landforms using Google Earth and illustrate in their passport. 

The students and I had loads of fun searching for landforms using Google Earth. We looked at some of the volcanoes in Hawaii and mountain ranges in Europe. One group even viewed Death Valley! 

In kinder and first grade, we discussed the difference between fiction and nonfiction. I forgot to take pics, but we made a t-chart to show the difference. We learned that fiction is to entertain and nonfiction is to inform. I used the book TOYS MEET SNOW by Emily Jenkins as the fiction book and WHO LIKES THE SNOW by Etta Kaner as the nonfiction example. If you have not read TOYS MEET SNOW to your students, it is a must read and a must have for your elementary library! 

To wrap up the week, it SNOWED!! It is hard enough to concentrate on a Friday, but to add on snow! We don't see snow very often here in Texas, so the students were all abuzz with excitement this afternoon. 

Also, to wrap up the week, my manicure has lasted all week through numerous book repairs. I love these Jamberry nail wraps!!