6th Grade Glogs 2013

In sixth grade, we have been working on creating glogs using Glogster (an online interactive poster). Students have been learning about Mezzo American Cultures in Social Studies. Their teacher and I collaborated to identify what resources students need to show on their Glog.  Students learned how to create an iMovie using the computer to record their learning on one topic area. They also revisited finding images online that had appropriate copyright. Students   What fun to see students so actively engaged in their learning. You can also see that students found websites with more information, and linked to their Glog.

Here are our completed projects:

Story Telling

I recently purchased Story Boxes made by Steve Light. I had seen them at a conference and thought it would be a great tool for my library.

Right now, I am taking a class on storytelling, and with all of the reading I have been doing on storytelling and the positive effect it has on early literacy skills, I decided to be brave and try telling stories to my students instead of just reading them from picture books.

Kindergarten Students Play/Retell "Little One Inch"

This week, I am teaching my kindergarteners about Folk Tales and telling them the story "Little One Inch." I read many versions of the story, then I diligently practiced telling the story to my own children over the weekend. I was surprised how much they enjoyed it. All weekend, my 4 and 6 year old asked me to tell them the stories of "Little One Inch" and "The Girl Who Loved Danger" (the other box I purchased). They not only wanted me to tell them the stories, but they told and retold the stories over and over again. "Mom, can I play Little One Inch?" was a frequent refrain. They were quite sad when I brought the boxes back to school today. (Maybe this summer we can make our own?!)

The retelling of stories is a beginning step in both reading and writing. This little box, with only the characters from a story really got kids excited to retell and "play" the original folktale. The pieces helped them remember the characters and the setting.

Today, when I brought the box to school, I could hardly wait for my kindergarten class to come in and share my story with them. They were captivated for every moment of the story and they too couldn't wait to tell the story and play with the pieces. I am thinking I will check these boxes out to teachers for Literacy Stations since the kids didn't want to stop interacting with the story box. I just need to figure out a system.

Parent Child Book Club Sign Up

To sign-up for the Parent Child Book Clubs on March 26:

CLICK HERE

First Grade Friends

These past few weeks I worked with the first grade teachers to create a class eBook using Flipsnack. These past weeks students worked with their teachers on writing biographies. Students interviewed one another and then wrote and illustrated an eBook about their  class.
I taught the students how to use KidPix to draw--and then with the classroom teacher we created these fun eBook for you to read.

1 H/R First Grade Friends eBook

1 Wessman First Grade Friends eBook

1 Smith First Grade Friends eBook

1 Diffley First Grade Friends eBook

 

New Book Week

It is new book week in the Brimhall Library. The library has put out about 500 new books this week. All of the new books are out on tables for students to view and get ready to read. New book checkouts start next Monday!

Students look at some of the new library books.

Little Bird Tales

Kindergarteners at my school have been learning about Holidays Around the World in Social Studies. They especially learned about many Festivals of Light. Students worked with their families to create a page in a book about a holiday they celebrated.

I took these beautiful images and scanned them into an eBook to share with families.

In Little Bird Tales I recorded students telling others about their families holiday.

Please See Our Class Books:

• Click to view my tale.
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Readability

This week I am collaborating with one of our sixth grade teachers to learn about reading online and doing research. Soon our sixth graders will be doing their big Wax Museum and learning about famous people from the past. As they start the research process--we wanted to teach them some information literacy skills about doing research. Earlier this month we talked about skimming and scanning on the web in preparation to doing online research.

Our goals in collaboration to their 6th grade reading and Social Studies Standards are for kids to be able to answer:

• Can I trust this source?
• Is this this the source that I am looking for?
• Can I understand this on my own?
• Do I trust this source?

We are working with our students to teach them about: READABILITY, TRUSTWORTHINESS, and USEFULNESS. 

Today, we taught the students about readability. We first discussed how students find answers to research problems and then discussed how they would go about researching the topic of "bats."

I found three articles about bats for the students to read. One was too easy, one was just right, and one was much too difficult. Students read the articles and discussed in small groups what made something readable to 6th graders.

As a class we were able to agree that something was readable if:

• They could read and understand it on their own
• The text had some pictures that helped them understand
• Pictures had captions
• The layout was easy to understand (kind of like a Time for Kids)
• They could skip words they didn't know and still understand the article
• The vocabulary was understanable
• They could retell in their own words
• The charts and pictures made it easier to understand
• The font was not too big or too small

Tomorrow we are going to discuss trustworthiness and usefulness.