Making Connections to the Past

At a conference last week, I was inspired by so many other media folks with great lessons and ideas, so I had to come back and start trying some out. One session I attended was about using images and documents from the Library of Congress along with historical fiction or other curriculum to bring time periods to life for students. I came back and right away asked some of the upper grade teachers for topic areas they had coming up to try it out with and heard the Wright Brothers from 4th grade. Here is an Animoto I made to kick start that unit later this year.

New Online Ordering and Wimpy Kid Preorders at Book Fair

Have family or friends that don't live here but want to be part of the book fair fun? They can now order online from 10/13-10/28 and purchases still count toward our school. Students can create online wish lists or purchase books that are out of stock also. Visit our fair website for more information.

You can also preorder the new Diary of a Wimpy Kid - Cabin Fever at book fair! Just ask Mrs. DuBois.

Remember we are open the week of Oct 17-21 and during Fall Festival the evening of the 21st. See you there!

Glogster Changes

As educators, we are always looking for new ways to interest kids in learning. For me, I found that using Glogs as a presentation tool was a way to do that. Kids would research anything if they got to make a Glog about it. Recently, Glogster EDU has changed the format so there is now a charge to use the student management tool, though students can still create glogs for free. I am still tinkering with it to see how that would work and in the process made a quick Glog about the media center. Check it out to see what a Glog is if you have not seen one before. In previous classes we have made Glogs about the White House, phobias, regions of the US and more, so I hope it will still work for us. It is difficult in tight budget times like these when once we seem to start to master a tool for education, the companies start charging for them. If you know any other great tools, please feel free to add them in the comments below! I am always ready to learn more.

Connected Community - Habitat Build

Several of our staff had the wonderful opportunity to practice what we teach and help create more of a connected community by participating in a Habitat for Humanity build. We learned some new skills, had a great day together, and helped out a community member. At the end of the day, we had installed windows, doors, stairs, a shed, and more!

New books have arrived!

Our first set of new books for the year has arrived thanks to profits from last spring's book fair! We have about 50 titles from Scholastic. They are in the media center and ready for check out! We tried to save them for the kids, but Caleb wanted to check them out first. We convinced him to leave them for the kids in the end though!



It's a Cinch to Cite

As we get geared up to start fun research projects again here at Caleb's Creek, I thought it would be helpful to give some reminders about copyright and citing your sources. As part of any research, you should always give credit where credit is due and you should cite your sources of both information and images.

Your best bet is to use images that grant you permission to use them from sites such as Creative Commons or Pics 4 Learning, or use clip art that is part of the program you are using such as Word. While these grant permission to use, you should still cite the source. For example, if you want a picture of a crocodile, go to Pics 4 Learning, search for crocodile, and this is one of the results you get. You should then copy and paste the url under the picture as I did here:

http://www.pics4learning.com/details.php?img=crocodiles16.jpg

For images, the url is usually enough to give credit, but it still must be for educational use and should not be a copyrighted image if at all possible. For research, you need to cite more information than just the website or title of the book. This citation maker site helps you fill in the information you need to create your bibliography. A bibliography is a list of the sources you used to gather your information and includes both print and non-print sources. Remember that information should be gathered in short phrases and put into your own words, not copied from your source.

We will use all of this a lot this year in the media center so be sure to remember to keep track of sources you use on your projects!





Getting Ready for Another New Year!

Wow! I can't believe how fast last year flew by! Here we are about to start a new year in just a few short weeks. Welcome to the 2011-12 school year! We hope to continue to have lots of new projects, lots of reading, and lots of great books in media center - along with a lot of fun! Stop by and see us at Open House and say hello.

Parents, we always need volunteers in the media center to help us with shelving, book fair, and other things that are always in need of being done. We hope to keep our circulation growing, but right now we circulate about 4000-5000 books each month so that is a lot of shelving we have to keep up with! If you are interested in helping out please let me know. We will train you so no previous experience required.

Thank you all for all you do! See you soon when you stop by to check us out!