A Seussical Week

Last week at school we celebrated Dr. Seuss' 108th birthday in a big way at Kickapoo!  We were doing activities of various kinds daily.  There were dress up days all week including Hat Day, My Many Colors Day where each class wore a different color, Wacky Wednesday which was cancelled due to our Ice Day, Wear red in honor of the Cat in the Hat, and finally, Pajama Day on Friday.  It was so fun to see all the kids dressed up for the different days.  Elementary kids eat these kinds of activities up!

Eva with her cute hat

In the Library, we did all sorts of fun activities during the week, too.  I had a Seuss Trivia Contest for every day of the week with one question for students in grades 4K-2 and one question for students in grades 3-5.  The kids couldn't wait to hear what the question for the day was so they could submit their answers in the jars in the Library.  For every question, I had winners from each grade level so that more students were winners. I was able to get some really cute Seuss pens off of Amazon and some Seuss buttons/tattoos/bookmarks.

3rd graders answering the trivia question

Perhaps my favorite Library Activity last week was making the Cat in the Hat cookies I saw on Pinterest out of Oreos, Gummy Savers and frosting.  The kids had a blast making the hat cookies and they told me they tasted so good!  It was fun to watch their faces as they concentrated so hard in putting together the cookies.

Dylan putting the frosting on his Cat in the Hat cookie

We had a very fun week and can't wait for next year to see all the fun, new things we'll be doing to celebrate Seuss again!

I Miss My Free Reading Time!

This semester I am a college student again taking an online class called Leadership and Administration of Library and Technology Programs through the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater as part of my 902 Professional Licensure Program.  While I love taking classes, meeting new people and learning new things, I must confess that I miss my free reading time.

As a mom of two little boys, much of my free reading time was spent reading picture books to the boys and watching them develop a love of books just like both their father and I have.  While I still am reading to them, I must admit, it isn't as much as it was just a mere short month ago when I had all sorts of time to devote to this and I miss it.

Is there an end in sight?  I'm afraid not unless you can fast forward the calendar to December 2013 when I will be done with all 6 courses.  Until then, it will be classroom readings for me and the reading I do with my students at school and that will have to pacify me until December 2013 when I'll be able to devour books again.  Until then, I'll keep reading blog posts, my Twitter feed and other posts on great books and add them to my TBR pile until I can actually get to them.

Now, off to bed to sneak in a little bit of reading...I think tonight's reading will be The Fault in Our Stars.

Digital Learning Day at Kickapoo

February 1, 2012, was designated as Digital Learning Day across the country and we definitely celebrated at Kickapoo!  While I knew that our teachers, for the most part, are quite avid technology users, I was pleasantly surprised to see and hear about all the fun digital activities taking place in our building on this day.

My 4th graders have been researching their favorite authors the past few weeks and on Digital Learning Day, the students took their information and began creating Glogs using Glogster.  This is a new program to them and they had a blast putting their information into the interactive posters.  It's fun to watch my students' creativity juices flow using a program like this.  I can't wait to see what their final projects will look like in a week or so.

A new to me Web 2.0 tool is Study Blue.  I was introduced to this by a colleague of mine who is using it frequently in her classroom.  When I saw the flashcards that the students were creating with Study Blue, it gave me an idea.  I could create flashcard sets for my Battle of the Books team and they could have access to these all the time to help them study their authors/titles.  It has been fun watching my team practice on the SmartBoard using their digital flashcards that I created.  My team has thanked me numerous times for creating these flashcards for them because they really have assisted them in memorizing their information.

My 6th grade book club met on Digital Learning Day, too, and they used Edmodo, an online safe social networking site to share their thoughts on the book that we're reading.  We use Edmodo some after our book club meetings and more so to communicate with each other on those days we don't meet.  It has been a tool that has worked well for us and the girls in my book club like having a safe site they can go to for our book discussions.

Along with what I was doing in my library, there were Mystery State Skypes taking place, students using apps on our NOOK Colors, teachers and students using Mimios in the classroom, teachers using digital cameras, and Yearbook students using Jostens software to create their yearbook.  Are these activities something that only take place on Digital Learning Day at Kickapoo?  Absolutely not!  They are taking place every day and technology is becoming something that is integrated into every classroom/subject area we have.  This is great for our students!

Now that you've read how we celebrated Digital Learning Day, I'd love to hear how you spent the day learning digitally!

Thank You, Kate Messner

For the past month, I have been reading Kate Messner's book, Marty McGuire, to my 3rd graders and they have really enjoyed listening to the story.  It's always neat to read about another class with students the same age and grade as yourself.

About halfway through the book, I got an idea to bring Kate to my students via a Skype visit.  I follow @KateMessner on Twitter and contacted her about visiting with my students and she was happy to oblige.  We got a date all set up which was a few days after we finished the book, so it was perfect timing!

Yesterday, January 31st, was the date of our Skype visit and you should have seen the 3rd graders before school.  They were coming into the library asking me, "Mrs. Malphy, is this the day of our Skype visit with Kate?" and when I told them it was, they just started jumping up and down and screaming.  It's not many days that a famous author takes time out of her busy schedule to talk to students in rural, Wisconsin so needless to say, the kids were ecstatic!

The students came to the Library Technology Room where we conduct our Skype visits shortly before noon, armed with notebooks full of questions for Kate.  Do you like frogs?  How long does it take you to write a book?  Why did you make Marty a tomboy?  Is Veronica Grace modeled after someone you know?  Would you be friends with Marty?  Oh, they had lots of them!  And Kate was gracious enough to answer all the questions that my students had, making each one of them feel special. 

My students went and blogged about our Skype visit as soon as we were finished and while I have yet to take a look at the blog postings, I know they're going to be real positive based off the comments I was hearing in the computer lab as they were blogging. 

Kate Messner, I would like to thank you so much for taking the time to Skype with my students.  Being able to bring an author right into the walls of our school via technology was absolutely wonderful!  I know that many of my students will never meet anyone famous, but through your visit, they were able to actually talk to a famous author and realize that maybe someday they, too, could become an author just like you and write about things they love.  They so enjoyed your visit, as did I, and I'm hoping more of my students can get to know you through your books and our visits in the coming months and years! 

Today is the Big Day!

Today is the day that many of us who work with children's literature wait for with much anticipation all year...the day that the American Library Association's Youth Media Awards are presented.  To be on a committee such as the Newbery or Caldecott would be a DREAM, but I don't know if I'd like all the pressure.  And the fact that you have to choose just one as the best of the best...I'm not sure I could do it as there are so many great books out there!

Having said that, I'm going to be bold and make my predictions as to what books I think would win the Newbery and Caldecott if it were up to me! 

For the Newbery Award, I am hoping that Kirby Larson's The Friendship Doll  takes this honor.  This book was a pure joy to read.  I laughed, I cried, I cheered for the girls and this is a book I HAVE to order for my own school library.  It was a beautiful book and I hope author Kirby Larson gets the recognition she so deserves.

For the Caldecott Award, I know there is a lot of buzz about Me...Jane being the runaway winner, but I'm really pulling for Balloons Over Broadway by Melissa Sweet.  I learned so much from this book and as is the criteria for the Caldecott, the illustrations just blew me away!  I absolutely loved this book and have shared it with my elementary students and they have loved it as much as I have.

The winners are being announced in under two hours and I can't wait to hear who gets the awards!  So glad we have a 2 hour delay for school this morning so that I can hopefully catch the live stream here at home before leaving!

Good luck to all those authors out there waiting for the call this morning!

And Our Next Read Is...

My 6th grade book club met today and discussed the book Esperanza Rising as the students just finished it up over the weekend.  Most students really enjoyed this book and I must admit, we had some great discussions on this novel.

While I was looking forward to today's discussion, I was most excited to see what the girls would choose for their next read!  Last week at our meeting, they were tossing around such titles as Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment, It's Raining Cupcakes and Al Capone Does My Shirts.  I gave little book talks on all the books and told the girls to take a week to think it over & we'd talk about it this week.

Well, after much debate, the girls decided on a title and our next read is...Al Capone Does My Shirts!  I'm so happy that the girls chose this title because it really is a great book.  I have read it numerous times and even though I know how everything is going to turn out in the end, this book never gets old for me.  Characters like Piper, Moose and Natalie are ones that I've never forgotten since my first read of the story.  They are characters that resonated with me and I'm hoping the same for my students.

We have our next meeting on Wednesday and I'm so excited to hear what the girls have to say about the book.  I have already had one student comment tonight on our Edmodo site that she really loves the book, so that's great to hear!  I'm hoping we can arrange a Skype visit with author Gennifer Choldenko as that would be a great experience for my girls to hear how she chose this topic to write about, how she came up with the ideas for the characters used and so many other things.  Connecting with authors is a great way to promote reading!

We All Have Scars

I have been reading rave reviews of the book The Scar by Charlotte Moundlic over the past few months, so I decided to interlibrary loan the book so that I could take a look at this book for myself.  I was thrilled to get the call from my public library the other day telling me the book was in! 

For those of you who aren't familiar with the book, here is the summary from Indiebound.org.

"A little boy responds to his mother's death in a genuine, deeply moving story leavened by glimmers of humor and captivating illustrations.

When the boy in this story wakes to find that his mother has died, he is overwhelmed with sadness, anger, and fear that he will forget her. He shuts all the windows to keep in his mother's familiar smell and scratches open the cut on his knee to remember her comforting voice. He doesn't know how to speak to his dad anymore, and when Grandma visits and throws open the windows, it's more than the boy can take--until his grandmother shows him another way to feel that his mom's love is near. With tenderness, touches of humor, and unflinching emotional truth, Charlotte Moundlic captures the loneliness of grief through the eyes of a child, rendered with sympathy and charm in Olivier Tallec's expressive illustrations."

The book is really well done.  You could feel the emotions the little boy was going through on every single page.  I was crying after reading the first page and did a lot of thinking about "scars" I, myself, have and how they have made me a stronger person for them.

Perhaps the biggest scar I carry with me every day which can't outwardly be seen is the scar of divorce: my parents'.  This happened to me when I was 5 and still at the age of 40 it affects me.  It's the reason I dated my husband for 4 years before we even talked about getting married.  It's the reason I want my boys to see their parents together having fun because I never saw that.  And this scar is the reason my husband and I would fight tooth and nail for our relationship because we never want our boys to go through what we did as children of divorce.

Of course, I have physical scars, too, which remind me of various events in my life: the malignant breast tumors I had removed, the scar across my stomach from two c-sections.  Both were very painful at the time, but I wouldn't trade them for the world because I'm better for having them.

As the little boy in the story moves on with his life, so must we all, but the scars are a reminder of what we've been through to make us the people we are today and I, for one, wouldn't trade my scars for the world.