Guiding Question: How does Aesop's choice of characters make sense for his stories?
Before reading our new stories, we talked about some of the animal characters we've met in Aesop's fables so far. As we reviewed each one, we discussed the traits of each animal and found that they matched well with the type of "person" Aesop wanted to write about. In our story for this rotation, "The Ant and the Grasshopper," we matched the busy, hard-working nature of real ants to the ant character in the story, and matched the hopping, singing personality of real grasshoppers to the lazy grasshopper in the story.The moral of this story dealt with the importance of balancing work and play. We talked about what our play times are (recess and free choice!) and what our work times are (math and more math!) and agreed that we need both in order to learn and be happy.
Grade 3
Guiding Question: How do you find a book once you know its call number?
Grade Three students are continuing their understanding of the locations of different types of fiction books in our library. In this class, they played "Call Number Bingo" and had to find nine books of various types by matching the call number to the book's spine label. This was a fun and active way to show that they can find books from the call numbers they see in the online catalog.
Grade 4
Depending on their class schedules, Grade Fours continued to use NoveList to search for books based on their interests or do an activity about the differences between the books in the "reference" section: dictionaries, thesaurasus, atlases, almanacs, and encylclopedias. After examining each source and coming to a group consensus about what each is best for, students took a quiz in which they matched an information need to the best source to use.
Grade 5
Guiding Question: What is "found" poetry and how can we create a "found" poem in the library?
Grade Five students created spine label poetry, a fun way to use "found" words in an unexpected combination. The only rule: the combined titles must evoke some reaction for the reader. See which ones work for you here.
More spine poems will be posted on students' class webpages. We added library skills to this activity by requiring students to reshelve their books!
