AM PreK Photos

Here are the AM preschoolers coloring the animals from Bark, George!, gluing trash onto garbage trucks after reading I Stink!, and dancing like robots after reading Boy and Bot.

 

Grade 3 FICtion Covers

Third graders now get to take out books from anywhere in the library ... but they're not sure how to find what they want. So we're learning how to use the online catalog and convert call number listings into shelf locations.

Right now we're working on the fiction section. Every fiction call number has "FIC" as the first line, and then the first three letters of the author's last name as the second line.

For example, if I wrote a book, the call number would be

FIC
MOO

What would YOUR call number be?

Students figured out the call numbers for a list of books and and then created their very own for a fiction book they "wrote." Here are some of their book covers: 

Grade 4 Dewey Detectives

The Dewey Decimal system is a way of sorting nonfiction books. I don't expect my students to memorize specific numbers; that's what the online catalog is for. I do, however, want them to understand how certain topics go together. At least according to how Mr. Dewey thought they did.

Each table of fourth graders got a stack of books from a "hundreds." They had to work together to figure out how the subjects could be classified under one major label. If you are not a fourth grader and think you have cracked the code, put your answers in the comments!

• 500s: planets, electricity, magnets, weather, dinosaurs, bugs, ecosystems, animals
• 700s: movies, art, photography, music, sports, jokes, crafts
• 900s: maps, ancient civilizations, countries, states, wars, explorers

Here are Room 11 students after they successfully identified their 100s' categories:

The next week, using what they knew about the categories, each group had to assign a stack of topic cards to the correct "hundreds." The students in both classes did a great job; even if they had something in the wrong place (like dinosaurs in the 900s), they were able to explain their reasoning (dinosaurs lived a long time ago, in ancient history). I love that they were using their brains!

Hour of Code - Monday and Tuesday

It's Computer Science Education Week! We're doing many of the unplugged activities at code.org to learn some programming basics, including writing algorithms and debugging problems. I took pictures of several classes at work:

Grade 3 Graph Paper Programming

Grade 4 and 5 My Robotic Friends

Guess who the robot is?

Two 5th grade girls wrote their own code for a new cup configuration!