It's Monday! What Are You Reading? July 2, 2012

Now that school is out, I have been reading a lot to my two young songs ages 4 and 5.  With the weather as warm as it has been, it has been perfect to stay in the air conditioned house and enjoy a wide variety of great books!

This summer we are participating in the Read to Lead in Wisconsin State Parks program.  Children ages 5-9 can read or have books read to them from the list.  If they read 20 or more and turn in their form, they are entered in to a drawing for a Kindle Fire or one of 10 other eReaders.  How exciting!  For more information on this program, please see my link above.

Books we have recently enjoyed from the list are as follows:

We have quite a few more of the titles from the list on reserve at the library, so what we'll read next week all depends on what comes in via interlibrary loan!  

We Want Your Summer Reading Pictures!

This summer the Kickapoo Library is again having a photo submission opportunity where students and staff can show off all the cool places they're reading over summer vacation.  This is the third consecutive year for the photo submissions and it grows every year.  Students and staff are welcome to submit more than one picture to me of their summer reading and I'll feature it on our library webpage along with the display cases for our annual All School Spaghetti Supper in August.  I get many compliments on these photos and can't wait to see all the places you're reading!

Jake and his cousin Claire reading on the Nooks last summer

Braeden and Brock reading while on vacation last summer

Book Spine Poetry

April is National Poetry Month and in honor of that, I thought that I'd have some of my elementary classes create Book Spine Poems.  I had never done this activity before, so I figured I'd better create some book spine poems of my own to show the students when they came in.  Here are just a couple of those that I created.

A Garden Poem

A Camping Poem

After introducing my poems to the students, I turned them loose in the library.  I told them that they could use any books in the library from Easy Books to Fiction Books to all kinds of Non-fiction.  I had the students pair up as I thought this would make it a little easier for them.  It was very interesting to see the topics that they wanted to create their poems about.  There were poems about the Titanic, poems about lots of animals and poems about food.  The kids did a great job creating some real imaginative poems.  Take a look at their work!

Ryne & Becca's Poem

Tava and Ally's Sweet Poem

Daniel and Wylie's Sharp Teeth Poem

Mitchell & Ruger's Poem

Ingrid & Kayla's Poem

A Farm Poem by Ryan and Ayden

Amber & Molly's Tasty Poem

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!