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May 26 - We missed library on field day, and this was a make-up and our final library class. We shared a book about knock knock jokes and sang Tom Chapin's "State Laughs" song as an introduction to making an origami book. Each student shared their favorite knock knock joke. And then we read a couple books about vaudeville. Here's a website with instructions so you can make lots of books on your own.
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May 4th - We talked about the Black-eyed Susan local winners and how the 3rd grade voted. In honor of the social studies activities around a bill becoming a law we shared two books. House Mouse Senate Mouse by the husband and wife team Peter and Cheryl Shaw Barnes. Filled with lots of mouse puns and pictures carefully inspired by our actual Capitol architecture, it shows the process of making a law. A Case for Loving by Selina Alko and Sean Qualls, another husband and wife creative team, is the true story of Richard and Mildred Loving who couldn't legally marry in 1958 Virginia. Their case in the Supreme Court changed the law of the land.
April 20 - the time to vote is almost upon us, so we packed in reading four more Black-eyed Susan picture book nominees, chosen by what looked most interesting. There are three titles available on BrainHive - The Most Magnificent Thing, Feathers: Not Just for Flying, and Joy in Mudville. Students will vote on Monday for their personal favorite and we will send in the figures to the Maryland Association of School Libraries' committees and wait to see who the statewide winners are. Third graders are terrific listeners and picture readers!
April 6th - Third grade is busy with research about the state of Maryland. Today in library we are looking at databases the library subscribes to to support student research. Why research databases? Well, the information included has been vetted by someone who's job it is to make sure it is accurate and likely to be useful. They aren't trying to sell you anything, so there are no advertisements. And the citation is always there already formatted for you to cut and paste. You need a password to get to the page with all the links and you can use the generic one (ssfs and friends) or your own. The link is on the left side of the library homepage - it says Research Databases with a little lock next to it. Once you have logged in for a session, you can use it again without logging in again. Try clicking on the link on the right side of the page that says For Younger Students for a short list of good sournces. America the Beautiful and Culturegrams have information about the states. The online encyclopedias like World Book and Grolier Multimedia will also have a lot about Maryland. You can access these any time of the day or night from any computer or device connected to the Internet.
We also made time to start looking at the Black-eyed Susan nominees, beginning with Carnivores by Aaron Reynolds and illustrated by Dan Santat. " They are not bad, eating meat is just what they do...."
March 16th - Elizabeth was out of the country with US intersession, and Aldona took over her classes. With St. Patrick's day so close, Aldona shared some Irish favorites - Fiona's Luck and The Ring of Truth by Teresa Bateman, and Leprechaun's Gold by Pamela Duncan Edwards. Those leprechauns sure can be tricky, and we do need to be careful about what kind of luck we wish for.
March 2nd - We ushered in the new genre - historical fiction - by sharing a picture book, Small Beauties by Elvira Woodruff and illustrated by Adam Rex that tells the story of a family who must leave Ireland during the 1840's and the potato famine. The Daughter, Darcy Heart O'Hara, helps her family remember not just the troubles and sorrows, but also the beauty and love in their lost land,, and the value of taking time to notice the beauty around us all. Students selected historic fiction titles to read from the many titles on display and found other books to read as well.
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| The Beest is ready to start his journey with the books. |
February 17th - We talked about Books Change Lives, our 2016 reading program. Most had success logging their minutes from the long weekend. If added permissions are asked for, that probably means you are not logged into google with your SSFS account. Check that and let us know if you have any problems. Also, please just enter the number of minutes rather than, say "1 hour". We are trying to use the power of a spreadsheet and we want columns of number to add, not words. Our Wildebeest is ready to be powered by your minutes - on to New Orleans, and then to Nkwanta! We traveled to Ghana by story power and read Seven Spools of Thread by Angela Shelf Medearis with gorgeous linoleum print illustrations by Daniel Minter. Then we visited a village on the coast to learn about a Master Weaver of Ghana in a book by Gilbert Ahiagble and Louise Meyer illustrated with photographs by Nestor Hernandez.
Febrary 3rd - Time for Mysteries! We shared the story of Detective Larue: Letters from the investigation by Mark Teague. There was lots to talk about in the illustrations - sort of a mystery in themselves. Which things really happened? David Shannon's book, Stories to Solve, a collection of short folkloric mysteries and riddles, is lots of fun and we put our brains to work on a couple of them. We also talked about the upcoming reading program Books Change Lives that starts next Friday, February 12th and goes for four weeks. (see the front page of the blog during that time for details.)
January 20th - Continuing the theme of biographies and still in the feeling of the SSFS MLK day of service on Monday we shared two books about remarkable people both of which give a person a little hope for our world. Happy Birthday Martin Luther King by Jean Marzollo and beautifully illustrated by Brian Pinkney, describes the great leader's life in simple language and keeps before us the central message of brotherhood and non-violence. Junkyard Wonders is yet another piece of memoir by artist and author Patricia Polacco, who credits a teacher and amazing classmates with helping her survive life in a "special" class. Inspiring!
January 11th and 13th - I came to the classrooms to teach about using the library databases. Fred Sisk joined us too, which was terrific. The link to the password protected page "Research Databases" that lists the library's many offerings is on the library page. There is a list on the right of that page that pulls out ones for younger students. Login with the generic login, username: ssfs, password: friends. The encyclopedias are a good place to look for biographical information, and SIRS Discoverer might also have some information. Check out the added resources like web connections and periodicals. Working on the chromebooks lets us save things straight to our own google drives. Remember that each database will always have a search box, and advanced search option, and a way to print, email and/or save the things you find useful. Some of them databases will read the articles to you.
Happy New year! January 4th - We launched the book report theme of biographies by talking about what makes a biography and where we shelve them in Tanglewood. All the books in the biography section have a call number that says E (which means it lives in Tanglewood) B (for biography) and three letters like JOH (which are the first three letters of the last name of the person the book is about). We learned that this is the only place in the library where the three letters in a call number are NOT the first three letters of the author's last name. Sometimes biographies are cataloged in the subject section of the featured person, like sports. Mostly, though, at SSFS, biographies are in the the biography section. We talked a bit about Jon Sceiszka and his many books and then shared a few chapters of his funny, sometimes a bit rude autobiography called Knucklehead (E B SCI). So many kids wanted to borrow it that we need to buy another copy!
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December 9th - We read books of the season. The Borrowed Hanukkah Latkes by Linda Glasar and Nancy Cote tells the story of a smart and stubborn girl who helps her equally stubborn neighbor celebrate the holiday. Lil Rabbit's Kwanzaa by Donna Washington and Shane Evans and has lots of participation for listeners.
November 24th - we had a short class to borrow books before break since we will be on vacation tomorrow during our normal class time. We took time to look at the book Grateful that illustrates John Bucchino's song which we listened to while looking at the pictures done by Anna-Liisa Hakkarainen.
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November 11 - Happy Divali! We celebrated Divali by acting out a script of the story of Rama and the Demon King. Everyone had a role - masks helped us keep track of the many characters. Rama is the symbol of Dharma - doing what is right and virtuous and there was a happy ending. Here is our bulletin board and display of books for the holiday.
Another version of the story is the picture book by Jessica Souhami.
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A witch tale to fit the genre and the Halloween mood - Heckedy Peg by Audrey and Don Wood - is a wonderful story of a mother's love for her children that is so strong she can free them from a witch's spells.
October 14th - Today in library we learned about one of the ways to read eBooks in our collection - BrainHive. This young company offers 9,000 ebook titles, some with interactive and read-aloud formats. Half of their collection is geared to Lower School students. I have recently updated our records so you can search the SSFS library catalog (Click the "search the catalog" link on the left menu of our homepage) for all their titles. Your login is a username formed by the first five letters of you last name and the first two of your first name ( Elizabeth Thornton would be thornel, for example) and the password is friends. There is a free app for reading the books on a mobile device - just search brainhive in app store. The SSFS account number is 4290097586. Please contact us with any questions about or problems with this resource.
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| Give it a try |
September 30th - To start this month's genre exploration in the classroom we talked about what makes a science fiction or time travel book. We shared a short story from Bruce Coville's Book of Aliens, "How I maybe saved the world last Tuesday before breakfast" by Lawrence Watt-Evans. I pulled many of our titles for kids to select from. There is still a shelf of great titles for those who want more of this genre. I thought science fiction got a great boost from Andy Weir's The Martian. Too bad they couldn't make a better movie out of it - why take away so much of the science!?
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| So many good stories! |
September 16th - Continuing with the ideas in Library Lil we talked about what makes a Tall Tale. Then we read Paul Bunyan written and illustrated by Steven Kellogg. He was super strong, super smart and super sized, and so was his blue ox Babe.
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WELCOME TO THE 2015-16 SCHOOL YEAR!
THIRD GRADE LIBRARY TIME IS GREEN WEEK WEDNESDAYS: 3A FROM 12:05-12:50 AND 3B FROM 12:50-1:35.
We talked about library, made our new shelf markers and shared Library Lil by Suzanne Williams with illustrations by Steven Kellogg.
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| A tall tale! |
June 2015 - What are we reading?
We finished our Readers Theater of Chadwick and the Garplegrungen by Priscilla Cummings. It is our last day of 3rd grade library classes for this year. Here is a picture of 3A with their origami crabs - bluish like Chadwick and Esmerelda. Here's the link to the YouTube video that shows the folding directions. Remember all books are due back on Monday, June 1st! Happy Reading.
We read What Does it Mean to be Global? by Rana DiOrio and the beginning of Serafina's Promise about a little girl living in Haiti at the time of the 2010 earthquake. It is written in free verse and we created some collaborative foldover free verse.
3/11 These two titles, each with a story about a creature as well as a lot of interesting facts, started off our Black-eyed Susan children's choice contest for this year.
How Much Can a Bare Bear Bear, the book we read last week on homonyms and homophones as part of our "word fun" unit, is one of our BrainHive ebook titles. The link to get to it is
http://www.mybrainhive.com/4290097586/pdfreader/how-much-bare-bear-bear33156. It is one in a series called Words are CATegorical that explore parts of speech with a sense of humor.
We read Hairy, Scary and Ordinary, a book about adjectives and then played a "fill in the parts of speech" game to write our own surrealist poems.How's this?
An ugly monster
runs with a
colorful yoyo
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