We are having so much fun reading the Enormous Egg as a school! Kids have been coming up to me for the past two weeks simply so excited that a dinosaur hatched out of the egg! Its amazing to see how excited some of these (especially younger) kids are! One teacher was telling me about how a Kindergartner was stopping every adult in the hall to tell them that a triceratops had hatched out of the egg. Every day also there are trivia questions and the kids are getting so excited to have guessed the correct answer and won prizes. Also, how cool it is if the front of your school has a dinosaur in it? He may not be alive, but he definitely responds to you!
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On Monday we started our 5th Annual One School One Book (OSOB) reading event. This program was started by the awesome Kim Nees, who was the librarian here at Sugar Creek before me, and now this is my second year doing it. OSOB is a school wide family based reading event where the entire school reads the same book at the same time. Each family gets one copy of the same book and reading about 1 chapter each night along a reading schedule. At school there is lots of discussion about the book, daily trivia with prizes on the morning news and opening and closing assemblies.
This year we are reading "The Enormous Egg" by Oliver Butterworth. We had our opening assembly on Monday and the kids received their books the same day. The assembly was super fabulous! My awesome related arts team helped me with a super cute skit, about the Rooser, Ezekiel, played by the Awesome Ms. McNinch, and the rest of the family discovering the enormous egg one morning on their farm. The kids loved it and were talking about Ms. McNinch as a rooster all day long. Even today, 3 days later they are still talking about the book and trying to guess what is inside the egg (they will find out when the egg hatches in the chapter they read tonight :)) As we read the book together at home, at school there is fun trivia, and contest and different teachers tie the book into their lessons in different ways. For example I am using dinosaurs as the theme for my non-fiction vs fiction research unit with my first graders this month. I overall love the One School One Book program, I think its a great way to get families reading together and families reading together is so important for early literacy and instilling that love of reading into students. It shows kids that parents care about reading at that its important (Which it so is!). One School One Book is fairly simple to implement at your school, its sponsored by the Read to Them foundation, and there _is a one time $500 membership fee. That fee lets you get discounts on books that you can buy from them and access to all of their supplemental materials. For this year I used their skit ideas, their parent letter home and their trivia. I have ordered by books from somewhere else the past two years. This year we ordered them from book-pal.com, and they worked out great and were less than $4 per book. I hope to post pictures of our opening assembly as soon as my colleague who took them gets them to me! December in the media center was busy. And if I did my blogging job correctly and fully I would have all of these different activities as different blog posts. However, as you can see from the date its already January and new and exciting things are about to start happening in the library so I will try to provide a brief summary of all of the awesome things that went on at the end of 2015. Culture Fair - This is our biggest research project with grades 2-5. Each class picks a country and becomes and expert on it. They research it and do projects and activities with it and read stories about it, etc. On a Night in early March we have a Culture Fair where the whole school comes to visit the different countries and eat different foods from each country and in general have a wonderful time. Here in the Media Center we start our background research. This year we had a travel theme. Our research question was: "Why should I travel to your country" The students had to research three reasons why. We used the awesome database Culturegrams (by ProQuest I think) to do the majority of our research because its just an amazing database for country research. This year I tried to focus a lot on note-taking skills so we learned about Trash vs. treasure note taking methods. Now in January the students will take their research they did with me and use it to create a technology product with our awesome technology teacher! :) Below you can see 2nd graders working on their research. Reading Responses with Legos - Another exciting new lesson I tried was using legos for students to demonstrate learning and respond to a story rather then a writing or drawing activity. Students do a lot of listening and reading responses in their classes by writing and drawing and I just received some more Lego donations to my collection so I decided to try something new and fun with 2nd grade. We talked about fractured fairy tales, how they were a traditional fairy tale with a twist of some sort. Then I showed students lots of examples of different Fractured Fairy tale versions of the Cinderella story. I read them Big Foot Cinderrrrella by Tony Johnson, because even though Cinderella can be seen as a girly story I wanted to keep my boys interested. After reading came the fun part. I gave each table a bucket of legos and their task. They task was to come up with their own fractured fairy tale Cinderella and create part of that story out of legos. It was amazing there was so much problem solving, creativity and critical thinking going on in that room. What kind of Cinderella could I make? How could I make it out of these legos? What part should I make? Plus, all of my learners from the lowest to the highest got it and were engaged and participating. Once they had 10 minutes or so to build we went around and shared our creations. They were amazing. Some of my favorites were Race car Cinderella where Cinderella was a car and rather then losing a shoe she lost a tire for the prince to find and Shop Girl Cinderella where her servitude was in a store that the family owned. But there were many many other good ones. Two other things to share for December were a really cool lego creation two 3rd graders made at the lego station and the Christmas Tree display my volunteer and I made.
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AuthorMrs. Bridges is the chief library ninja and Media Specialist at Sugar Creek Elementary School Archives
July 2017
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