This past month, in honor of Dr. Seuss' birthday and Read Across America, our youngest bobcats have been doing all things Seuss. We started our first lesson with The Cat in the Hat and acting out words for lists of word families we created. Our next Seuss lesson focused around the book Hop on Pop. For this book, students practiced reading sight words from the book, and then let out some of their active energy with a Hop on Pop game. The third week we used the book One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. With this book, students created their own illustration for the title and played a matching/memory game with upper and lowercase letters. This past week, Kinders concluded their study of Seuss by learning about the Theodore Seuss Geisel Award, an award that honors Dr. Seuss and identifies great books for beginning readers. After reading this year's winning book, Don't Throw to Mo, and one of the honor books, A Pig, A Box, and A Fox, students went to various stations where they got to look through and read other Theodore Seuss Geisel Award books, read Dr. Seuss books, and play a word family game with a partner. Take a look at some of our activities through the pictures below. Part of our Hop on Pop lesson Part of our One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish lesson 2016 Theodore Seuss Geisel Award winner and one of the honorees.
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The past two weeks, all of our 1st and 4th grade classes have been completing STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) projects during their library visits. They have encountered challenges and road blocks along the way, but worked hard in their teams to complete their task at hand.
Our firsties are currently studying the Caldecott Award. After reading a recent Caldecott Honor book, Creepy Carrots by Peter Reynolds, students were introduced their their challenge - creating their own fence to contain a creepy carrot using only the materials provided. Overall, teams did a great job of working together and problem solving when something didn't work quite as planned. Here are some pictures of teams working and their final products.
Our friends in fourth grade created wind turbines for their STEM project as a culminating activity to the energy research unit we completed together in the learning commons. For this STEM activity, student teams took on one of six possible countries as they created their wind turbine. One added challenge for this particular STEM project was that the "resources" available (straws, cardboard, index cards, etc) to each country was different. Some teams felt that a lack of certain resources made their engineering task more difficult. This frustration for some tied directly into the Technology Justice component that we discussed towards the end of our unit. Did you know that about 33% of people in the world do not have electricity and some of the daily luxuries that we may take for granted without thinking twice about it? Through the creation of alternative energy sources, like the wind turbines our 4th graders pieced together, hopefully this percentage will decrease. Below are some pictures and video clips of our Wind Turbine STEM Challenge.
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CategoriesJenny WilliamsAfter 8 years in the classroom, I'm very eager and excited to be in my 5th year as Library Media Specialist in the Learning Commons of Langston Hughes! Archives
April 2019
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