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.
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.
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.