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HAPPY SUMMER READING! A BOOK IS A GREAT COMPANION AT HOME, ON THE ROAD, or WHEREVER YOU FIND YOURSELF. LOVE YOUR PUBLIC LIBRARY AND HAVE FUN!
May 24 - To wrap up the year we did Speed Dating With Books. Piles of books were all over the library and kids had just a few minutes at each table to make the acquaintance of books they might like to spend time with over the summer. They captured the covers with their iPads so they could remember their interests and get them at the public library or a bookstore. And a few took books home to speed read and return by next week.
May 10th - we enjoyed our visit from the team that created The Peace Tree. They told us about how they got to be an author and an illustrator, how they began the book, how they found each other, and much more. They answered lots of questions from 5th graders and encouraged our students to write and read as much as possible.
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| Kazumi Wilds and Sandra Moore |
Play rehearsal displaced our regularly scheduled time to meet. Make-up classes got together and we read a couple more Black-eyed Susan nominees and voted for our favorites. We also read The Peace Tree: The little bonsai with a big story in preparation for a author visit on May 10 - both author Sandra Moore (and SSFS parent!) and illustrator Kazumi Wilds will be coming to class on May 10th.
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March 29th - We started reading the Black-eyed Susan picture book nominees and talking about the titles for 4-6 graders in this year's contest. We have to read 5 picture books in order to vote, and we will do that in class. For the 4-6 nominees one has to read three titles to be able to vote, and to be able to come to the first ever SSFS Black-eyed Susan luncheon with middle schoolers. The two sections chose different titles to start with - here are the ones we looked at -
March 8th - We checked in our our Books Change Lives progress. For the Spiritual Theme of honesty and integrity we enjoyed Demi's retelling of a Nasreddin story called The Hungry Coat. The Sufi populist philosopher and wise man always has something to teach us, this time not to judge a man by his clothes, but rather by his character. Then we had an exercise to demonstrate student ability to find books using a call number.
February 23rd - We talked about our progress with Books Change Lives so far. We shared the book 10 Little Mummies by Charles Yates, illustrated by G. Brian Karas to introduce some topics for research about Ancient Egypt. We then looked up the topics and searches we had brainstormed together to see what one of our databases, Ancient and Medieval History, had to offer. The databases are available from the password protected link to Research Databases on the website. The students' individual logins should work, but there is also a generic login (username: ssfs and password: friends) that will get you in as well. There were some surprising difficulties, primarily our filtering system working overtime, but we always have workarounds. One of the advantages of using the articles and other offerings of the databases is the ease of citation. Each student was charged with sending a citation to our Google classroom.
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| A study in perseverance |
November 6th - We met in Yarnall library's computer lab to take advantage of the bigger screens and faster response time to explore Google Earth. We used google's Five Easy and Cool things to do with Google Earth for part of our lesson. It was very interesting to see our school and homes from the vantage point of this powerful tool. We also talked about it as a way to convey information as the folks at ilovemountains.org did with their layers.
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October 19th - We explored the eBook provider, BrainHive,
which gives us access to nearly 9,000 titles from PK-12th grade. For
searching and reading on iPads or iPhones there is an app - find it at
the app store. The reader part is great, but searching works better at
the website or through our library catalog. To register, enter the
account number 4290097586, your username (comprised of the first five
letters of your last name and the first two of you first name) and the
password friends. Check the box that says," remember you account
number?". Login to the browser version with the same login and
password.
October 5 - We began with brainstorming vocabulary for searching and talked about some search tricks like wildcards and quotation marks to make better searches. We explored the library catalog to find resources about sustainability and food. We found a lot of good resources to bring back to the classroom including the Food Atlas.
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September 22 - Fifth graders came to the Yarnall Library to learn the lay of the land and find out about Virginia author, Tom Angleberger. Everyone put an icon for the library page on their iPad home screen. Among other things, he has written the Origami Yoda series. We saw a video of Tom speaking, heard some of Origami Yoda, folded our own Yodas and found books. We will continue to meet in Yarnall at least once a month.
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| With you may the force be. |
September 8th -
Fifth graders came to the library for the first time this year. After a "whip around" sharing of a favorite book read over the summer, we made our shelf markers and listened to Heather Henson's That Book Woman with David Small's illustrations. Students added to our mural that asks "What would you miss if you couldn't read or write?" . They gave responses like - "The adventure", "The Learning", "Being able to share experiences", "Everything!".
WELCOME TO THE 2015-16 SCHOOL YEAR!
FIFTH GRADE LIBRARY TIME IS GOLD WEEK TUESDAYS: 5A FROM 11:45-12:30 AND 5B FROM 12:30-1:15. WE HOPE TO SEE YOU BORROWING BOOKS MANY OTHER TIMES OF THE WEEK.
What did you think about William Kamkwamba and his inventions?
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| What could you build to make life better? |
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What we are reading/doing:
On our last class day in library this year we looked at the classic BBC April Fools film about the spaghetti harvest. Not everyone spotted the hoax at once, but many combined what they already knew about pasta with their new research skills to make an accurate discernment . It is a skill we all get to use in our daily lives, with so much information coming our way, and only some of it accurate. Keep asking question! And remember that all books are due back on Monday, June 1st.
Students investigated websites they have used for their market day research using the classic Who? What? Where? When? Why questions to consider reliability and usefulness. Some of the questions proved very hard to answer - a kind of clue in itself. We continued the discussion the next week and also talked about some sites we use to check on the content of websites and emails - snopes.com and urbanlegends.com. Then we tested our ability to discern truth from fiction with the Fake or Real quiz of 50 photographs. Everyone got at least half of the questions right, and a few got close to 40 right, but we all were fooled by some of the photoshopping. We learned about the google image search that allows us to find out where some photographs come from. How do you score on the quiz?
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| Here's the first image - real or fake? |
3/9 -
We shared Hoop Genius about Naismith's invention of the game we know as basketball. You can read this as an ebook by clicking on the link in the library catalog, or by going directly to Mackinvia and entering our school, the login - ssfs, and the password - friends. Currently, we have 50 ebooks on this platform, but we will continue to add things.Then pairs of students received other Black-eyed Susan picture book nominees to look at and decide how they could best present the book to classmates.
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