Mock Election 2012

Program

Our 4th grade team did a fantastic job last week of holding a mock election for the student body. Two weeks ago, each student came to the gym and "registered" to vote, then last week they came back, checked in, and voted for the next president using a picture ballot. Each class was assigned one or two states to represent. Then, in an all-school assembly, the electoral votes were tallied as each "state" announced their classroom victor. Here is a news story a local news channel did on the mock election. It was a great learning experience for the kids and they had a lot of fun doing it. The winner? Based on our electoral votes, it will be Mitt Romney, but we will see if they were correct tomorrow. No matter who you vote for - be sure you vote!

We're famous!

Our final map of the electoral votes.

Rick Riordan Fans!

 I admit I am a big Rick Riordan fan. I finished Mark of Athena  this weekend already and now have to wait a whole year for the next one! I love that some of my kids are big fans of his also though. A group of them have checked out all of his books and love to get them at book fair. I was beyond excited for them when Bookmarks emailed me to ask if we might want 4 free student tickets to give away for a Rick Riordan event at Wake Forest University last Friday night.

Yes, please! 

Some of the winning submissions

I talked to our fifth grade teachers and curriculum coordinator to decide how to give away the tickets. We settled on having the interested students write a letter about why they wanted to win the ticket. I chose 4 students and it was the highlight of my day to tell them they won! They were so excited and I passed out the tickets. One student's dad was kind enough to send me a couple of pictures from the event. I was hoping they would get to meet Mr. Riordan, but he had pre-signed the books. They did get to submit questions and enjoyed his talk though.

Getting ready to get started

Thank you Bookmarks!! What a great event and the students were so excited to win the tickets!

Rick Riordan during the event

With their signed books!

Learn NC Does It Again!

Learn NC is a fantastic and probably underutilized resource! There are so many things there you could not even list them all - lesson plans, online professional development, new teacher support, field trip suggestions, and so much more. I recently found where they have take Common Core and NC Essential Standards and added lesson plan links. While I have not looked at other areas much yet, I have spent a little time on the Information and Technology Essential Standards. It is such a great way to get ideas! I have not seen any that I will do just as they are written yet, but it has given me several springboards to ideas that I will tweak to use with my classes. I have also found a lot of resources I didn't know about through the lesson plans.

Check it out and add a comment of your favorite lessons or resources you find!

Wiki What?

I am experimenting with using wikis this year. I am starting with my fifth graders and may work down to younger grades in the future, but I don't know yet. We spent our time going over what a wiki is, how and when you might use a wiki, examples of a wiki, and cyber safety and etiquette. This video was a really helpful introduction for them. (The previous link will take you to the video on TeacherTube, it is also on YouTube, but can't be embedded.)

 We also discussed the roles in a wiki - editor, writer, and reader. The students are so far starting out as readers who can read and comment, but can't edit pages yet. As the year goes on, we may increase the role to writer so they can really get a feel for the point of a wiki, but I wanted them to practice with cyber etiquette a bit first. I am hoping to use this wiki for a few things this year - as an exit ticket sometimes at the end of a class, as a place for students to post book requests, and a place to post book reviews.We may also use it for group work collaboration if we get to the point of becoming writers. Here are some of kids commenting on the wiki.

This is our wiki homepage.

Any other great ideas of how to use a wiki?

Jukebox from 'Back in the Day'

Photo Source

My kids always use the phrase "back in the day" when they are trying to ask me where books about earlier time periods are, I guess that must be a popular phrase among grandparents in the area maybe? Anyway, it popped into my head this morning when I saw this post on the Library of Congress blog for teachers. (Which, by the way, if you are not following, you should! There are so many resources there that you don't know about or forget about!)

The post was about their online Day by Day jukebox, which I had not seen before. You can choose any date ( I think the default is today's date) and see recording from many years in the past available to play online. What a great addition to calendar time in the mornings, music class, math lessons (how many years ago was this recorded, what is the beat, etc.), social studies (time periods in history), etc. Those are just the first ideas that popped into my head. The first recording for today is from 1905.

If using the Day by Day feature is not what works best for you, you can also search by several different methods including by artist, genre, playlist, etc. There is a brief First Time Here review also. This would allow you to use it as more of a unit. For example, we talk about Marian Anderson with Black History Month and there are several recordings here by her, so you can let students actually hear her singing.

How could you use this in your classroom?

We Give Books

Do you use e-books in your school? I was reminded recently by a colleague about the We Give Books site. This is a great site for e-books and is FREE! They are good titles too, including books like Stand Tall Molly Lou Melon, Llama Llama Misses Mama, DK Explorer, DK Vikings, Human Body Q&A, and more. There are not really any chapter books I have seen, but lots of picture books and non-fiction books for elementary ages mostly. With over 200 e-books and all free it is a fantastic resource in itself, but there is an added bonus. The site says "Simply choose the charity you want to read for and then select the books you want to read. For each book you read online, we donate a book to a leading literacy group on your behalf." It doesn't get much better than free books that give free books when you read them! Check out We Give Books soon and use it with a whole class, on your own, with a small group, or as a center.

Any other great resources for e-books out there?

Edited to add: Here is a link to my ongoing livebinder collection for e-books. 

It's Nice to Be Recognized!

 
Thank you to the people over at TeacherCertificationDegrees who named our little blog home one of their Top 50 School Library Blogs! I am honored to be in the company of some of the other blogs listed that are some wonderful library blogs. Check out some of the links there to find some real gems such as Busy Librarian, The Unquiet Librarian, The Eliterate Librarian, and the AASL Blog. It is always nice to find out that someone actually reads your blog! What are your favorite blogs?

Jog the Web to Learn About Coca-Cola

I recently learned about Jog the Web, a source that lets you take a group of sites you want kids to go through, add your comments or directions, and it puts it into a webquest sort of format for you. (You can also search for and use other people's 'Jogs' that they have done.) I have a teacher currently working on a cookie marketing project with his students where they are designing cookie companies complete with budgets, storefronts, ads, recipes, and more. He asked for some advertisement sources that show advertising over history, so I collected some into a livebinder for him. When I found Jog The Web, I thought it would be a good topic to try it out on, but you could do it with anything. I narrowed it down to Coca-Cola ads over time to see how they have changed, since that is one product and one they should be familiar with. Below you can see how it looks with the directions at the top of each page directing students to think about things like who are the ads aimed at, what are they using to make you want to buy the product, and how have the ads changed over time. On the left are arrows that take them through the sites, or they can click on the page titles below the arrows.

This is a screenshot of the Jog I made about Coke.

Jog the Web was very easy to use and you can find lots of short video tutorials. I really liked this one that I posted below, and it showed me enough in about 5 minutes to get me off and running. I made my jog in about 5-10 minutes once I had all the sites I wanted to use.

If you create a Jog, please leave the url and topic in the comments below! I think my next one might be on different authors maybe?

How to make a Jog using JogTheWeb from James Smith on Vimeo.

Thank you Deborah Diesen!

It started with a blog post about our Literacy Day a couple of weeks ago. One of our Kindergarten classrooms did their door decoration about The Pout Pout Fish and the Big Big Dark. Well, imagine our glee when the author herself left a comment on our blog post! I looked up Deborah Diesen's blog and found her email, and emailed her to thank her. I also asked her if she would be willing to skype with the class and she said Yes!!

On Monday I got a wonderful envelope with a picture of Mr. Fish on the return address label.

I opened it and was so excited to find bookmarks for the students each signed by Mrs. Diesen herself!

 Today was the big day! At 9:00 we Skype called Mrs. Diesen and got to talk to her! She answered lots of questions. Many were typical Kindergarten questions such as what are your kids names and how old are you, but some asked book questions like how did you come up with Mr. Fish and are you working on a fourth book. She was very good with the kids and answered everything they asked her with a smile. The kids learned that often authors and illustrators don't work together to make the books, she has a fourth book coming out soon, and she came up with Pout Pout Fish when she was making faces trying to make her son laugh one day!

 Then, she read us Pout Pout Fish and the Big Big Dark!

 She even taught us hand motions to go with the refrain so we could do it together.

 Strong like a shark!

 We passed out the bookmarks and the kids were so excited! One even put both hands on her face and made a face almost like the Home Alone face she was so happy!

THANK YOU MRS. DIESEN! You made our day and helped this group get even MORE excited about reading!! We appreciate the bookmarks and your time. I think these kids will always remember this experience. I can't say enough about how much we appreciate it and how much we enjoyed it.

Skype with Suzanne Slade!

We were lucky today to get to have a Skype session with Suzanne Slade as part of Literacy Day! She has written about 85 non-fiction books for kids and was a lot of fun to talk with. We even met her dog Corduroy! A second grade class that had recently been studying biographies was the class that got to talk to her and they came with many great questions. We found out there is even a picture of her son and husband canoeing in a book she wrote about canoeing. Thank you Ms. Slade!! We hope we can talk to you again next year for Literacy Day!

She showed us a map of schools participating and where she lives in Chicago.

The kids were prepared with questions they wanted to ask!

She showed us some of her books.

We even got to meet her dog!

Thank you to Suzanne Slade for a fun experience that really excited the kids! Skype is such a great way to get some really cool opportunities!

Edited to add: Mrs. Slade sent us a picture she took of her end of the session! See it below. Thanks again!!

Reminders from kids...

We have been working on the solar system project with third graders this week. I was working with a class yesterday who was finishing up their research. The last question, you can see below, says to draw what the planet looks like on the back of the sheet. This is for them to take with them to do the illustrations from later on. (Excuse the blurry pictures, I don't have the best camera for close ups!)

#12 is the question he was answering on the back, but part of me also loves that he thinks it being his favorite color is an interesting fact about it. The librarian side of me thinks we might need to define important facts a little better next time -though it may be important to him!

One student worked very hard on his and added lots of details around the planet, such as stars, a comet, the moon, and other planets. He also added one thing I know he didn't see in his book about Mars. Do you see it?

Look closer, in the top right corner.

See it?

Heaven.

He said "I don't know what it looks like but I know it is up there and so I just used that to show it."

Last week, we lost a third grade teacher at our school. As we miss her and grieve in our own ways, kids have ways of reminding us of innocence and bigger things. Now, I don't know that this student ever had the wonderful opportunity to meet our friend and colleague, but she taught third grade in past years, and the coincidence was not lost on me that this was a third grader who felt the need to add Heaven to his view of the solar system. She would have appreciated that he wanted to add that. It was just for him really. And for the rest of us, but he just didn't know it.

Polar Express Day at the Creek!



Today is Polar Express day at Caleb's Creek Elementary, which means in addition to wearing pajamas and consuming loads of hot chocolate, there are lots of lessons integrating the book The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg. If you are looking for ideas, there are tons of sites with compilations of links to lessons such as Education World, Busy Teacher's Cafe, and Houghton Mifflin, among others.

Some of the best ideas I saw involve elements of the book like using it to study the use of metaphors and similes, point of view, and writing your own version, but could also be a great way to do a lesson on adjectives to describe what you would see, using your 5 senses, writing or following recipes (what if you had to quadruple a recipe for everyone on the train?), showing just one illustration and have students write using that as a prompt before reading the book, and so many more. What if stories could be great also - what if the train broke down, what if you were chosen, what if you got to spend the night travelling with Santa, what if you were Santa?