Myths/Legends with 4th Grade!

Students in Mrs. Irving's class have been working hard to create digital stories in the Media Center. The students first compled their pre-writing, editing, and revising in the classroom. Mrs Irving noted they worked especially hard on peer-editing. Mrs. Husketh showed the class 3 examples of digital storytelling programs: Zooburst, Photostory, and Mixbook. The students then selected which type of story they wanted to create and made a plan to move forward. Digital storytelling is a great way to integrate the NC Information and Technology essential standards with ELA. We applied two objectives for this project: 4.TT.1.2 and 4.TT.1.3.

Students are still in the process of creating their stories--we learned that it takes a lot of hard work, planning, and critical thinking to complete a digital story. We'll post a few examples of each type of digital story when the class finishes!

Epiphany works on typing first



Hannah adds pop-up characters to her Zooburst story



Typing is the first step for Zooburst and Mixbook

Aileen edits her page in Mixbook

Illustrating our stories for Photostory

Jon and Fedora practice orally in preparation for recording their voices in Photostory

Storyboarding and illustrating our stories

Literary Garden

Thanks to the Garden Club we have 9 new raised vegetable beds in the courtyard outside the Art room. The materials for these beds were made possible through a grant from Katie’s Krops. 9 classes adopted these beds and will be growing a variety of vegetables and herbs to fight hunger in our community. The students will also get to sample a percentage of the vegetables. To support student learning with this project, I wrote a grant to update the gardening collection in the Media Center.

If you’d like to contribute to the grant, please click on this link: https://ioby.org/project/literary-garden.

Thanks to the Club families who have already made a donation!

NCSLMA Conference--Creating Global Learning Communities

Tomorrow I will be presenting with two of my media specialist colleagues at the NC School Library Media Conference. Our presentation below contains dozens of links to help educators bring global awareness into the classroom. I hope to return with many new ideas to share with the Club Blvd. community!

Super 3--Plan, Do, Review!

Students in Ms. Lopez's 2nd grade class have been learning about a research process that will help them with information needs this year. It is called the Super 3 and it has 3 steps: Plan, Do, Review! Ms. Lopez and I introduced this process to the students on Monday. We learned that each step has a purpose to help us complete research.

1.  Plan
What am I supposed to do?
What do I need to get the job done?
What do I want it to look like when I'm done?

2.  Do
I must locate the things I will need (books, websites, materials etc.).
I  need to ask questions, read, and take notes.
I need to use the information I find to create something.

3.  Review
Did I do what I was supposed to do (checklist)? 
Am I proud of what I've done?
What was hard for me during this process? What did I learn?

Our Project: We used the Super 3 steps to help us create a Weather Dictionary. Check out the pictures below to see each step of the process!

Step 1: Plan!
We worked with our partner to plan out what we needed to do to find, record, and review our information. Books, computers, magazines, and real experts were all suggested resources for us to use!

Step 2: Do!

I showed the students how to use a great non-fiction website called PebbleGo. PebbleGo had all the articles we needed to learn about our weather words. We could listen to the information and read along at the same time. There were also video clips and pictures to help us understand more about our weather word. We learned how to take notes using phrases and then we put our phrases together to write a definition in our own words.

Step 3: Review!

In the last step of our process we used a checklist to review our work. We had to make sure we followed all the directions and submitted our very best efforts. After our definition was complete, we reflected on the Super 3 and how it helped us think about the steps of a research process. The Super 3 guided us to a fantastic final product--our Weather Dictionary!

Summer Reading Celebrations

Congratulations to all of the students who participated in summer reading this year! We had so many students participate that we had to have two days of celebration this week. On Monday, Anna Cromwell from the Durham County Library Main Branch was our featured storyteller for the 1st-3rd grade celebration. She also gave students prizes for being such good listeners and readers.

On Wednesday, students in 4th and 5th grades came to the Media Center and participated in 3 interactive literacy stations. Students created and filmed book commercials for their favorite books using Flip cameras, shared book recommendations with friends on Destiny MyQuest, and learned more about the Media Center through a scavenger hunt.



All students received a certificate, a bookmark, and a new book for their summer reading accomplishments. Special thanks to our 3 parent volunteers: Scottie Hunsberger, Lisa Rakouskas, and Liz Clark. These events would not have been successful without their help!

The following dedicated readers filled out their entire READO boards this summer. I am so impressed with their efforts to read a wide variety of genres and styles!! Congratulations :)

What's the Buzz in 1st grade?

1st graders in Ms. Noble and Mrs. Roach's classes have been learning what it means to do "research" in the media center. Students enriched their study of insects by using the database PebbleGo to learn more about 1 particular insect. Working in partners, students read and listened to information about their insect's body, habitat, food, and life cycle. Habitat maps, photos, and video clips helped us understand how our insect survives in the world. We also learned that it is important to take good notes while conducting research. Writing down details will help us remember what we learned and we can share this knowledge with our classmates.
We were able to cover two of the Information and Technology Essential Standards for 1st grade during this research time:

• Use a variety of technology tools to gather data and information (e.g., Web-based resources, e-books, online communication tools, etc.)
• Use technology hardware and software responsibly

Curriculum Night

Last week we held Curriculum Night to inform parents about the new Common Core and Essential Standards. My media intern, Mrs. Lehotsky, created the Tagxedo above to illustrate the most important words from the Information and Technology Essential Standards (ITES). As library media specialist, I have the priveledge of collaborating with classroom teachers to integrate the ITES into core curricular areas. The 5 main essential standards we will cover in each grade level are: Sources of Information, Informational Text, Tecnology as a Tool, Research Process, and Safety and Ethical Issues. These standards were written using the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy. If you have questions about what this will look like for your child, please contact me or your child's classroom teacher.