Thanks to everyone!

We met our book fair goal! Thanks to everyone who volunteered and helped at book fair to make that happen and thanks to everyone who came and supported our school. The money we earned will help us purchase new books for the media center. Some of the books we are ordering and hope to have soon include Diary of a Wimpy Kid #4 and #5, the Warriors series, Big Nate books, new Babymouse titles, the NCCBA Picture Book and Junior Book nominees and more! So check out the library in a month or two to see all the new titles!

Starting off with a good scare!

We are starting the year off with a good scare! This class was working on improving writing with more details and descriptions by writing stories about dreams with aliens. They had some great material!

We are so excited to have our readers back at school. Don't forget your purple and silver on Spirit Fridays!

Volunteers needed soon!

Welcome back everyone! We are so excited that our students are reading and so interested in our books! However, this means a lot of shelving each day. If you are interested in helping us shelve books anytime, check out students in the mornings between 8:25-9:00, or as needed in other areas, please let Mrs. DuBois know! We are happy to show you what to do, and even just 15 minutes of shelving can make a difference.

Thank you all for all you do!

Welcome Back for 2010-2011!

We are busy getting ready for everyone to come back to school! New books are here waiting to be added to the media center as  you can see here. Hopefully we will be able to get them ready for you near the beginning of the year.  We have some new magazine subscriptions this year too! Be sure to stop by and see us when you come for Open House on the 23rd!

Stop by the media center to Check Us Out!

See you soon!

Emerging Readers Site

Check out this great site for emerging readers: http://toon-books.com/bandp/

Glogs on a Blog

Some of the 5th grade has been working on researching states and regions of the US. We wanted them to have a fun way to compare the regions and states without the boring charts and maps, so we turned to Glogster. Today the first class got started on their Glogs and loved it. They did an excellent job and were so into the project they did not want to stop and kept asking how they can do them at home and on their own. The assignment was to personify and compare two regions or states as a couple and how compatible would they be. Take a look at what a great job they did - (these are still in progress)!

You can see some finished ones here, here, here, here, here, and here. It was great to see each different personality in their Glogs and how they made connections. All we did was give direction on how to use Glogster and what they had to include, all the designs are fully the kids' creativity.

Ahhh...Technology

Technology is a wonderful thing and adds so much richness to our curriculum and involves students in ways they never would be otherwise.

Except when you get them excited and it goes wrong. Sometimes you just have to roll with the way things play out - go with Plan B. (That's how I roll!) Anyway, today we were very excited for 5th grade to come to the media center and participate in a live webcast with Karen Cushman, Newbery Award Winner and author.

Once we got 3 classes in and settled, we got started - or so we thought. Now, keep in mind that I had checked and double-checked the site, clicked and tested the click here to test your connection button at least 3 different times, and the pre-webcast music was playing perfectly.

Then, it started - and so did the issue. The streaming was intermittent so you heard parts of words, then nothing, then a sentence, then a part of a question. We tried for about 10 minutes hoping it would clear up, but it didn't, so we called it a day with the webcast. The good news though is that it will be archived here on or around May 15th, so you can see it after the fact, it just is not live so not as much fun. Oh well! I think it is a good thing for students to see that sometimes things don't go as you planned and it is ok to sometimes need a Plan B, because that is how we roll here.