Detailed Deweying, Wordless Caldecotts, and more...

It was a snowy, icy week here. Hope everyone stayed safe and slip-free!

PreK 3 and 4: Guiding Question - What nursery rhymes feature "Jack"?

With our flannels, we learned "Little Jack Horner" and "Jack and Jill." 

We were all pretty shocked with the idea that Little Jack Horner would actually stick his thumb into his food. Gross! And our reaction to "Jack and Jill"?...ouchie!



Kindergarten: Guiding Question - How do rebus rhymes help us learn new words?

We learned the poem "Sing a Song of Sixpence" and some new words like dainty and parlor, and we talked about sarcasm (was it really a dainty dish? no!). 

The emphasis in the unit is on repetition and the concept of nonsense, but of course nursery rhymes have quite deep and hidden meanings. 


Grade 1: Guiding Question - Who is Elmer?

Elmer loves hiding in our Christmas cactus!

Continuing with our "classic character" theme, we read the first Elmer story (Elmer, by David McGee) and another favorite, Elmer Takes Off. 

Both are popular because Elmer loves a good joke. 




Grade 2: Guiding Question - What's the difference between a concept book and a story? How do illustrators use layout to create certain effects?

Wordless Caldecotts: Stories

Wordless Caldecotts: Concepts

We used wordless Caldecotts to talk about the difference between a story (has a character and clear beginning, middle, end) and a concept book (about an idea with no required order). 

We also looked at layout choices an illustrator makes. 

We learned about double-page spreads, full-bleed vs. bordered pictures, and we talked about the effect of each. 

We decided that full-bleed pictures seem to spill off the page and give an effect of the image continuing. Bordered pictures narrow our focus. Double-page spreads are a favorite: we love that expansive feeling!

Grade 3: Guiding Question - How do we sort Dewey numbers that match?

For Dewey Part #2, we examined the problem of matching numbers and learned to use the author's last name for a final sort. Looking at one number at a time, we put numbers in order from small to big, and if numbers match, only then do we use ABC order. 

After some group practice, we rotated between two stations: Order in the Library computer game and laminated "book spines" with the correct answers on the back.

Grade 3 continued to work with their space research this week. Our empty shelf made an impromptu desk in front of the encyclopedia section. 

Stay tuned for the new IKEA couches that will go here instead!


Grades 4 and 5 began their Golden Dragon reading. Students have been busy telling me about the titles they've already finished during first recess.

A rockin' week!

Week 20

This was our first week with our new rockers, and I'm happy to report that we are doing a great job with "gentle rocking" as we enjoy them.

Here's the round-up for our lessons this week!

PreK 3 and 4: Guiding Question - What's similar, what's different?

The Three Little Kittens came to visit us this week. We read two versions of the Mother Goose poem and talked about the similarities and the differences between them. 

The Three Little Kittens, by Jerry Pinkney

This retelling of the Mother Goose rhyme highlights the playful antics of the kittens. We add the sounds "meow" and "purr" when they appear in the text to add an engaging touch. Pinkney's watercolor illustrations show the kittens close-up, tumbling about, acting contrite, and doing their best to behave. 

Classes loved the last line, when the kittens have found and washed their mittens but ask "May we go out to play?" We know they'll be in the same predicament if they do!

The Three Little Kittens, by Anna Alter

A perfect introduction to the classic rhyme, this little volume shows mice stealing the mittens. Colored pencil drawings support the single verse given here. This version is much simpler and the illustrations have a clean look. It's perfect for preschoolers.

Kindergarten: Guiding Question - What's a conflict? How can we identify the problem in a story?

One story strategy we use is identifying the problem in a story. We read together and talk about what the character is trying to solve. Did it work out in the end? How did it get solved?

Chrysanthemum, by Kevin Henkes

Chrysanthemum has a clear problem: she used to love her unusual name but now she doesn't. 

When she starts school, three girls in her class snicker and make fun of her. "Her name has 13 letters!...She's named after a flower!...Let's pick her!" they snort. It's not until the lovely Mrs. Twinkle appears, a music teacher all of the girls admire, that these three realize that a name like Chrysanthemum's is "absolutely perfect."

Grade 1: Guiding Question - What's "creativity"?

For the purposes of our Caldecott unit, we define creativity as having "new ideas." 


There's no better Caldecott winner to introduce this concept than David Wiesner, a five-time medalist. We looked a three Wiesner books and will read more next week as we learn about how an illustrator works. 

We started with The Three Pigs and talked about layout. Children noticed how Wiesner showed the pigs entering and exiting fairy tales by using different artistic styles and extending the borders of the pictures. Next, we read Tuesday and talked about inset pictures and how they allow the illustrator to show the background and zoom in on the action in the scene all on one page. At the end of the story, some children noticed that the clouds on Wednesday morning look like frogs. This made a good segue into Sector 7, an entirely wordless story about a cloud factory. 

Grade 2: Guiding Question - What are some festivals celebrated in other countries?

Light the Candle! Bang the Drum! by Ann Morris
This picture book tells about lots of different holidays and celebrations around the world. As we heard about each one, we guessed the country and pointed it out on the map.

Next, each child took a volume in the series "Festivals of the World" and found a page of interest. We paired together to read captions and learn about one festival in our book. Next week we'll share more and create a map of the countries and their festival.

Grade 3: Guiding Question - What is "traditional literature"? 

Grade three begins a series of genre studies this week. Each lesson, we'll talk about the qualities of a particular genre and share some books in that genre. This week we talked about traditional literature. See our genre map here. It will grow as we add to it each week.

We used an excellent presentation created by Paula McMullen, a librarian in Norwood, Massachusetts called "Traditional Literature 3-5" available for download here. The presentation shows how traditional literature includes many types of stories. 

This flow chart is particularly helpful.

Grade 4 & 5: Golden Dragon book talks!

The book trailers, author interviews, and author websites are up  and ready to view on our library website. Students have already begun book talks about some of these Golden Dragon contenders. I'll also be posting talking avatars called "Vokis" on our home page, each featuring different books from the list. 

Here's last week's Voki about the novel Out of My Mind, by Sharon Draper.

New Units!

Week 17

This week we're back into the swing of school and starting new units. I hope everyone had a good vacation. It's fun to hear about all of the travels our little ones have been on these past few weeks.

PreK 3 & 4 - Unit: Mother Goose. 

Guiding Question: What are some Mother Goose counting rhymes?

www.mothergooseclub.com

Each week we'll learn new rhymes with fingerplays and songs. This week we learned a classic "One, two, buckle my shoe" and a lesser known one, "One, two, three, four, Mary's at the cottage door..." 

These are wonderful vocabulary builders and many have videos for extra practice and fun at home. See the Early Childhood page of the library website for videos and rhymes posted from Mother Goose Club.

We use different versions of Mother Goose in this unit, beginning with Rosemary Wells' two wonderful volumes: My First Mother Goose and Here Comes Mother Goose. These feature one poem per page with large text and illustrations making them wonderful for read-aloud.

Kindergarten - Unit: Story Strategies

Guiding Question: What's the difference between "real" and "pretend"? 

We looked at a nonfiction book with photographs of porcupines to establish that "real" means things that actually exist in our world. Then we read What Mommies and Daddies Do Best which features pretend porcupine characters. How do we know they're pretend? They're wearing clothes! 

Finally, we read Dogs Don't Wear Sneakers and Chimps Don't Wear Glasses for more silly examples of things from the author's imagination. These are all written by Laura Numeroff.

Bear playing the drums!

After reading, 
we created 
our own
pretend 
characters: 
an animal 
doing something people would do! 

Rabbit juggling & digging!

Here are two drawings some kiddos did after 
pretending.

Grade 1 - Unit: Caldecott

Guiding Questions: What is the Caldecott award? How do we decide if illustrations are "good"?

We learned that the Caldecott award is given once each year for the best picture book in the United States. There is one gold medal winner and there can be one to three silver medal winners, called "Honor" winners.

As a group we brainstormed ideas about what we like to see in picture books. One of the ideas was that we like colorful pictures. We looked at several black and white Caldecott winners and read one: Kitten's First Full Moon, which I reviewed for Book Talk Tuesday.

As we study Caldecott books in the next several weeks, here are the criteria we decided to look for:

- Pictures that match story (and extend our understanding)

- Pictures that are creative (and we'll look at what that means to us)

- Pictures that grab us (elicit an emotion, or detailed, or use a neat technique, or expressive, or ?)

Grade 2 - Unit: Continents and Countries

Guiding Question: What continents and oceans do we know? 

In their classrooms, grade 2 students are learning about different types of communities. We will support this work by learning about different continents and their countries. In the first part of the unit, we will learn the continents and oceans and do a mini-research project about countries that celebrate festivals. This will support a unit in Hungarian Culture class about the Hungarian festival Farsang.

We read Follow the Line Around the World, by Laura Ljungkvist and talked about the continents, countries, and animals mentioned. We also took a quiz via Shepperd Software to practice our continents and oceans.

Grade 3, 4, 5 - Starting Golden Dragon and Silver Knight!

Stay tuned for a separate post about our reading program for grades 3, 4, and 5. This week, classes learned about the program, about the books and about where to find the trailers and more information about each title.

Questioning, Creativity, and Website Evaluation

Week 23

PreK 3 and PreK 4 - Guiding Question: What is "nonsense"?

We learned that nonsense applies to stories and poems that are so silly they don't make any sense. We also learned the difference between good, better, and best because we read and watched different versions of the Mother Goose classic "Hey Diddle Diddle" and ranked our favorites.

We started with reading from Mother Goose Remembers, an anthology illustrated with embroidery and applique by Clare Beaton, then watched two video clips, found on the Early Childhood page of our library website. After talking about which was good, better, and best, we voted. The Sesame Street video clip seemed to "win."

Kindergarten - Guiding Question: How does questioning help us be better readers?

"Reading" by Manet (http://goo.gl/k5Eed)

Asking questions while we read is a strategy that keeps our minds active and engaged. It gives us a purpose: we want some answers! We learned that questions start with words such as who, what, where, why, when, and how. Using this projected image, we brainstormed questions about the painting. As always, kinders amaze me with their depth: asking questions such as, "Why is she sad?" and "How can there be so many kinds of white?"

Next we moved to the classic picture book Grandfather Twilight, by Barbara Berger, and applied our questioning strategy as we read. Again, we focused on just asking, not answering, and talked at the end about how some of our questions were answered and some weren't. Finally, we practiced some silent questioning with the story The Forest, by Claire Nivola. Students tapped their temples as we read, showing me that they had a question in their minds. Thank you to the Mosaic listserve for the idea of using art in this lesson. 

Grade 1 - Guiding Question: What is "creativity"?

During our Caldecott unit, we examine winning picture books and discuss why each was chosen. This week, we looked at examples of creativity. We defined creativity as "doing something in a new way" and talked about how we can be creative in many areas (even math!)  We looked at two illustrators' work to talk about two kinds of creativity: Simms Taback and David Wiesner.

Taback retells traditional stories but uses art materials and paper in unusual ways: he mixes paint, fabric, and photographs; uses cut-out pages; and layers images. We read his Joseph Had a Little Overcoat (Caldecott winner) and sang There was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly (Caldecott honor book). David Wiesner, however, uses a straightforward watercolor technique, but creates surreal images that tell stories loaded with unusual ideas. We watched a Reading Rainbow video of Wiesner's June 29, 1999. 

Grade 2 - Guiding Question: What are examples of exaggeration?

We continued talking about Tall Tales this week with a focus on finding examples of exaggeration. Exaggerated events start with a bit of truth and then become completely wild and crazy! We watched a video about Paul Bunyan for examples and added the exaggerated events to our MindMeister cluster map. This map is a work in progress that we will add to throughout our unit about traditional literature.  

Grade 3 - Guiding Question: How can we "sell" a Dewey section?

We're kicked off a new project this week. Students are working in pairs to create video advertisements promoting one Dewey section of the library. In this first class, I explained the project (see "Dewey" then "Dewey on TV") and students started choosing the books and websites that they thought would be the most cool, interesting, and appealing to their classmates. We used Kids Click, a search engine with resources pre-approved by teachers and librarians. This is a great place to start since it's possible to search for websites by Dewey range. 

Grades 4 and 5 - Guiding Question: How can we tell which websites have good information?

www.google.com/googlegulp/

This week we learned about questions to ask ourselves when looking at an unfamiliar website. We used this handout "Examining Electronic Resources" from read.write.think and this Web Quest from a school in Avon, CT to practice evaluating websites. We'll continue with this next week...it takes lots of practice! More website evaluation tools from my diigo bookmarks here.

Predicting, Tall Tales, and David Wiesner

Week 22

PreK 3 and PreK 4 - Guiding Question: What are some differences in versions of Old Mother Hubbard?

Old Mother Hubbard, by Jane Cabrera, makes the story of Old Mother Hubbard's quest to please her dog seem totally hilarious. The illustrations, done in thick swabs of paint, are bright and lively and give the characters playful expressions. Large-size painted text, one line per page, slows down the poem making this a good read-aloud for hearing students' observations along the way.  

Mother Hubbard's Cupboard, by Laura Rader, uses half-sheet pages to reveal funny surprises in the poem. When we turn the top half of the page, we find the cupboard bare, turn the bottom half and see the dog crying because "the poor dog had none." 

Finally, we read a rather gloomy version: Old Mother Hubbard, A Nursery Rhyme, by David A. Johnson. The illustrations feel old fashioned, suiting the time period of the poem, and the colors are muted to the point of being faded. This version follows the original poem exactly, so the humor is a bit dead pan: "She went to the baker's to buy him some bread, but when she came back, the poor dog was dead!" Although not our favorite, this was a great contrast to show differences among the three.

We also did two activities: Spot the problem in a picture of Old Mother Hubbard, and "Who has the bone?" in which students took turns hiding a bone and having others guess who had it.

Kindergarten - Guiding Question: What does it mean to "predict" events in a story?

Predicting is the same as guessing what will happen, and the act of guessing is more important than whether our guess comes true. Guessing shows that we are actively thinking as we listen or read - this is the key to being good readers! 

Two stories work well for teaching prediction. In The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear, by Don Wood, the narrator questions the mouse about what he's doing. We are tempted to answer for the mouse based on our own predictions. When it turns out that the bear doesn't arrive, we have a fun surprise and see that guessing incorrectly doesn't hurt our enjoyment of the story at all! Use of this story was inspired by a lesson plan at Teacher Vision.

The second story, Lost and Found, by Oliver Jeffers, invites us to guess along with the main character about what the stray penguin really wants. The boy guesses that he's lost, but is he?

Grade 1 - Guiding Question: Which illustrator has won the most Caldecott medals? How does he work?

David Wiesner is a master illustrator who has won three gold medals and two silvers. We looked at several of his picture books, examining Tuesday most closely. After "reading" this wordless book, we followed Wiesner's creative process on his website. 

 

Grade 2 - Guiding Question: What are tall tales?

We learned a new word: hyperbole! We learned that tall tales started with a grain of truth and gradually became more and more exaggerated as they were retold over time. To illustrate the point, we played the old game "telephone" with each person whispering what they heard from the person before...the final saying varying greatly from the original. Likewise, tall tales are full of hyperbole.

We have many tall tales in our library; we read two. John Henry, by Ezra Jack Keats, is a story in free verse with mixed media illustrations. Keats keeps it simple, focusing on the drama of the tunnel's cave-in and the contest of man v. machine, and he stuns us with the Henry's death at the end. This is a good tale to show how some tall tales contain more truth than others. 

In contrast, Kumak's Fish, by Michael Bania, is comical and far-fetched. Kumak uses a special fish hook and catches a fish so large that the entire village has to hold on to the line to keep Kumak from falling in. What a surprise to find that the big fish is actually a long line of fish, each holding on to the other to keep the first one from getting caught!

Grade 3 - Guiding Questions: How does knowing the difference between whole numbers and fractions help us understand shelf order in the Dewey section?

It was Dewey Game time this week with online games to help us put decimals in order, and shelf order cards to put in order, too. I made the shelf order cards from extra spine labels from Follett orders. (Thanks to "Tips and Bright Ideas," a column in LMC magazine for the idea). Some are easy to put in order, some are wickedly hard! Guess which one everybody wanted to try? 

 
For example...

Easy: 001, 102, 292, 398 

Medium: 398.2, 428.1, 573.7, 741.5, 808.1 

Hard: 509, 513.2, 523.8, 535.6

Wicked Hard: 551.21, 551.43, 551.48, 551.55, 551.6, 551.6911 

Grade 4 - Free library time, Dewey tour, and Historical fiction

Check-out, reading workshop, historical fiction tie-ins using websites via WebPath Express on Destiny (Mrs. M's class), and Dewey tour (Ms. L's class)

Grade 5 - Guiding Question: How can we shorten a URL for citations? 

As students worked with Citation Maker in their classrooms this week, they noticed that some of their URLs for images were exceedingly long! I added google URL Shortener to the grade 5 tab and showed students how to use it to put a shorter URL (web address) into their citation.