Mock Caldecott Finalists - Batch 1

Each January, the American Library Association awards the Caldecott Medal to the artist of "the most distinguished American picture book for children." Who will win in 2014? Well, first- and second-graders are going to make their pick in library, and we'll see how our choice lines up with the national award. After round one, the following were cleared to move on with near unanimity:

Don't Play With Your Food!
Bob Shea

Bob Shea wrote and illustrated last year's winner, Unicorn Thinks He's Pretty Great. I let him know via Twitter, and he appreciated it ... here we are meeting in person at the Lincoln school author event back in October:

source: bobshea.com

His latest starts Buddy the Monster, who is determined to eat the cute little bunnies he comes across ... but they seem to be able to outwit him. The book started out slightly differently. Here is his original storyboard (with narration):

My Teacher is a Monster! (No, I am Not.)
Peter Brown

peterbrownstudio.com

I LOVED that in every second-grade class, at least one person recognized Brown's style from last year's finalist Mr. Tiger Goes Wild. It's very different from the one he used in Creepy Carrots, which I ready to the first-graders last year in kindergarten.

One thing I like about this book is that the pictures help to tell the story. The moment when the kids realize that the teacher is changing color and shape is awesome!

You can download a parent/teacher kit that goes with the book.

7 Continents and 5 Oceans with Grade 4

Fourth-graders are learning about maps and atlases.

How quickly can you correctly identify the world's continents and oceans on your first try? 

If you need a refresher before clicking the link above, watch this video.

C.P. in Room 11 is our champion - I think his best time was 19 seconds.

If you'd like to be able to identify the countries on each continent, try playing the geography games on freerice.com. This site donates 10 grains of rice to the World Food Programme for every correct answer.

6th Grade Keyword Challenge - Taboo!

source: hasbro.com

We've been talking about keywords, which are the words you type into a search query. To get good results (before you even start evaluating the sources), you need to use precise terms and consider alternative ways of expressing them.

Sixth graders practiced this skill by taking turns describing objects to their classmates. We kept track of how many wrong answers were given until we had enough information to definitively identify the object ... usually at least three terms were needed.

The activity is similar to the board game Taboo!, where the person giving the clues has to avoid saying certain giveaway words. The students decided to play their own version during checkout the next week, using the terms on the card as the keywords.

You can play Taboo! at home with this online version. 

There are also apps out there that you can download to your phone or tablet. Have fun!

Daytrip Idea: Concord Museum Family Trees Exhibit

If you're looking for a fun family daytrip, why not consider the Family Trees: A Celebration of Children's Literature exhibit at the Concord Museum? This annual display uses picture books to inspire Christmas tree decorations (but it's open through January 4, so you can go over vacation).

Can you figure out which books are featured below?

Can You Moo?

The library often sounds a little like a zoo, but this past month, it also sounded like a farm! I read a selection of animal sounds books to the younger classes, including:

scholastic.com

goodreads.com

Because students' animal sounds sometimes got a little ... enthusiastic ... I taught them the conductor's cut-off signal. Which reminded me of The Sesame Street All-Animal Orchestra, conducted by Seiji Ozawa.

Kindergartners drew animals, and I helped them write what the animals say. Butterflies were popular (according to the kids, they say, "Flutter, flutter"). Meanwhile, DLP and PreK danced to:

And finally, what discussion of animal sounds can now be had without wondering ... What Does The Fox Say?

Minecraft Books are Here!

Behold ... I will be getting some of each for the library collection. And students will be able to buy their very own during the book fair next week.

Fall Book Fair Preview - Book Trailers

Did you know that you can watch book trailers for lots of the titles that will be at our fall book fair?

The video below will give you a sneak peek at the following books aimed at grades K-3:

• Captain Underpants and the Tyrannical Retaliation of the Turbo Toilet 2000
• The Yeti Files: Meet the Big Feet
• Dolphin Tale 2
• Disaster Strikes: Earthquake Shock
• Creepy Carrots
• There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly
• Bugs in My Hair!
• Eerie Elementary: The School is Alive!
• How Do Dinosaurs Say I'm Mad?

And the next video gives you a sneak peek at the following books aimed at grades 4-6:

• Origami Yoda: Emperor Pickletine Rides the Bus
• Dolphin Tale 2
• Sisters
• Loot
• Life on Mars
• I am Lebron James
• Ever After High
• Jedi Academy: Return of the Padawan
• I Even Funnier
• Mouseheart

Three of These Things with Room 4

We talked about sorting and categories in first grade, since the students are learning how the library is set up so they can choose their own books. After sorting some objects, we watched this classic video:

Then the students created their own "Three of These Things" game board. After viewing their creations below, you can play an online game to see how good you are at figuring out what is different. The link is at the end of this post.

Click here to play the game.


Common Core standard addressed: L.1.5.A - Sort words into categories (e.g., colors, clothing) to gain a sense of the concepts the categories represent.

Three of These Things with Room 1

Here are some of Room 1's creations:

Common Core standard addressed: L.1.5.A - Sort words into categories (e.g., colors, clothing) to gain a sense of the concepts the categories represent.

Happy Halloween!

Scary Faces!

In kindergarten, we read Can You Make a Scary Face? by Jan Thomas. The answer to that question is yes.

Boney Research - Grade 2

Second graders took notes for the first time in library, listening to Dem Bones by Bob Barner and learning such information as:

• Where is your patella? 
• How many vertebrae are in your spine? 
• Where is your clavicle? 
• How many bones are in your foot? 
• Which bone is the longest? 

Then we created a list of questions they had about bones and practiced using a table of contents to find the answers. Here are some of the facts they learned:

• A muscle is attached to a bone by a tendon. 
• Bones are made of water and calcium. 
• Broken bones can heal themselves, but they have to be immobilized.
• Joints have different names. One kind is a ball and socket.

And here they are at work:

If you'd like to know more about bone names, the Animaniacs can tell you:

Grade 4 Dewey Matching Game

As a follow-up to our last lesson, when fourth-graders figured out Dewey Decimal System categories, this week they assigned a stack of topics to those categories. Each table got a set of "playing cards" that they had to place in the correct area of their "game board." (Many thanks to Judy Ouellette for cutting the cards out!)

Some of the cards were kind of tricky ... you could make the case for a certain subject to be in more than one Dewey category. So long as the students could explain their thinking, they got full credit. Here are the teams at work:

 These two got EVERY SINGLE CARD put into the correct category -
the first team to achieve a perfect score in my four years of teaching!