Kindergarten Bilingual Story time

Our Spanish-speaking kindergarten students have been lucky to participate in a weekly bilingual storytime this semester. As part of their service learning requirement at Duke, four undergraduates planned and delivered a bilingual storytime every Monday morning. The students were exposed to familiar titles and authors while interacting with facilitators in Spanish! Hands-on activities followed each story and the students loved it! I am so grateful to our Duke volunteers for donating their time and energy. The pictures below are from our last storytime together. At the end of class, each student selected a bundle of books to keep with the promise that they would read them with their families!

Reading one of the Pigeon books by Mo Willems--a favorite!

Playing a game on Mo Willems' website: Pigeon Presents

Students were so excited to pick out books!

Which one should I choose?

We love books :)

Book Fair!

Thanks to all the volunteers and families that came out to support our spring Book Fair! It was an amazing success!! The Club Blvd. community raised almost $4,000 for the Media Center. We will be able to buy a huge number of books for the Media Center and classrooms with this money. Thank you for generously supporting our readers :)

Students earned a chance to win a gift certificate by guessing the answer to this question. Each day they were given a new clue on the announcements to help them narrow down the number. What is your guess??

One of our lucky winners! :)

Multicultural Night

Multicultural Night was celebrated last Thursday evening at Club Blvd. with music, dancing, art, food, and learning about cultures all over the world. I look forward to it every year as a way to honor all the cultures and families represented in our school community!

As our contribution to the evening, Señora Moehlmann (Spanish teacher) and I collaborated to plan a Country Cube research project for Mrs. Hayes’ 4^th grade class. Each pair of students randomly drew the name of a Spanish-speaking country of the Caribbean or South America. The students then used Culture Grams, an online database available through the Durham County Library, to complete their research and find pictures. Using Culture Grams gave the students an opportunity to explore a new database, practice skimming content for important facts, and examine helpful text features. 

The students had to work with their partners to find 2-3 facts for each topic, cite their resource,  and then create PowerPoint slides to glue on their cubes. The topics selected were: food; holidays; language; life as a child/school; and free choice. The students were motivated to learn about a new Spanish-speaking country and excited to share their information with the school. The class had to remain focused to complete their Culture Grams research, PowerPoint slides, and cube construction in just 5 short days!

Selecting a country

Conducting research using Culture Grams

Typing the PowerPoints

Our display board for Multicultural Night

Senora Moehlmann with a 4th grader and a few cubes

Screen shot of Culture Grams