K/1 Music Fun!

Mrs. Childress' K/1 class visited the Media Center this week as part of their Hispanic Heritage studies. Mrs. Husketh showed them a map of the world so we could see how many countries speak Spanish as a native language. First we found the continent that we live on and then we noticed how many Spanish-speaking countries are close to us.

Mrs. Lehotzsky (our media intern) introduced an instrument called the guiro (pronounced we-ro) that is played in many Latin American countries. We also learned that this instrument is sometimes called the "fish instrument" because it looks like a fish!

The friends in K/1 learned how to hold this instrument and how to use the stick to make sounds. A few students demonstrated how to make music with the guiro.

Mrs. Childress' class will be making guiros to share at Hispanic Heritage Night next week. We can't wait to hear their Latin American rhythms!

Landforms

Mrs. Baynham's third graders just finished a unit on landforms. They visited the Media Center several times during this unit to learn and share information. At the beginning of their studies, the students visited the Media Center to learn about PebbleGo--a wonderful non-fiction online database. Each partnership used PebbleGo to learn more about 1 specific landform. Students worked hard on writing down the information in their own words and also using diagrams to help explain the meaning of words.

At the end of their unit, the class came back to the Media Center to learn about a technology tool to help them share information about landforms. In class the students created a collage out of cut paper to give a visual demonstration of their landform. They also created a script of information to share their knowledge. Students had 3 things to remember when reading out loud: know the words, sound smooth, and read with expression! They practiced these fluency tips many times before moving on to the next step.





Mrs. Husketh scanned the landform collages and then we used Photostory to record each pair's information about their landform. Students loved recording their voices and decided it was funny and strange to hear their themselves through the speakers. Please watch the movie below to hear and see a glimpse of what Mrs. Baynham's class learned during their landform unit!

Storytelling with UNC

Mrs. Lehotsky (my wonderful intern) and some of her classmates from the School of Library Science at UNC-CH visited Club a few weeks ago. They are taking a storytelling class and offered to share their folk tales with us. Ms. Lopez's 2nd graders were the lucky audience members!

We learned what makes a story a folktale and also reviewed where we can check out this traditional literature in the Media Center. We have many interesting folktales to explore this year!

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!