Glogs, Dewey, and Froggy

Busy fun week!

Our combination of fixed and flex schedule kept me hopping this week! Grade 3 is working on space research so we had extra sessions with digital and print encyclopedias and a new database: PebbleGO. In Grade 5's landform unit, students learned to research and organize their information on a digital poster called a "glog".

PreK 3 and 4: Guiding Question - How can Mother Goose help us learn some prepositions?

We learned the rhymes "Little Boy Blue" and "Little Miss Muffett." For each poem, we took turns repeating the rhyme using flannel pieces and emphasized the position words: Little Boy Blue sleeps UNDER the haystack. The spider sat down BESIDE Little Miss Muffett. 

Kindergarten: Guiding Question - How can rebus rhymes help us recognize words?

Rebus rhymes match pictures and words and Mother Goose rhymes use lots of repetition, so these are good poems to read in rebus format. We learned "Mary had a little lamb". 

We use the rebus rhymes from Enchanted Learning.





Grade 1: Guiding Question - Who is Froggy?

Froggy Goes to the Doctor and Froggy Goes to School, by Jonathan London

After we read two Froggy stories, we talked about his characteristics. He's silly, makes lots of mistakes, hops around "flip, flop, flop", and it seems like others need to yell to get his attention (and he always answers "whaaaaaat?") 

We talked about how series books with the same character let us get to know his or her characteristics really well. 

Grade 2: Guiding Question - How do pictures support a long story in a Caldecott-winning book?

Emotions with expression/body lan

This week we talked about how to determine whether illustrations fit well with a story. 

We used Caldecott winner Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, by William Stieg to see how narrative and pictures fit together. 

Double-page match to setting "Night came with many stars"

Elements we noticed: 

*pictures show the setting and should match what's described

Excitement after a page-turn

*pictures can amplify emotion described by showing facial expressions and body language



*pictures can increase our excitement with a "page-turn" effect.





Grade 3: Guiding Question - How do we "read" Dewey numbers?

I made up a quick slideshow to lead students through Dewey Order for the first time. 

We talked about how we put the numbers into order from small to big, and about how we only need to look at one number at a time to determine whether it's smaller or bigger than another Dewey number.

Students practiced at each step as the order become more complex. Last, they rotated among tables to practice with real book stacks.


Grade 5: Guiding Question - How do we organize information in a research project? 

This project took several blocks but thanks to our flexible schedule, we completed it all within one week. Here are the steps we followed.

1) Students read widely the week before to get an idea of what landform they'd like to learn about. They used links on the library website and our digital encyclopedias.

2) Students created a google doc for their notes and links. The teacher and I made comments in the docs along the way if needed.

3) Students looked for information in categories: Definition, Description, Explanation of how the landform was formed, Comparison and Contrast to another landform, and "So What?" or concluding remarks about the landform's importance and impact.

4) Students took notes in bulleted lists and kept links or book titles for each source used.

5) They used the links to create correct citations using an online citation maker. These were pasted into their google doc.

6) When all categories were complete, students pasted their information into a glog which included a link to their citations.

Here are some examples of their work.

Mountains
Glaciers