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. The AM K students especially got a huge kick out of it and yelled for an encore.

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

Most Popular Books - Q1

wimpykid.com

Our top-10 list for the first quarter:

• Diary of a Wimpy Kid series
• WWE Encyclopedia
• Goosebumps series
• Dork Diaries series
• The World Almanac for Kids 2006
• Amulet series
• Bone series
• Captain Underpants series
• Geronimo Stilton series
• Elephant & Piggie series

I'm hoping to get copies of the new Wimpy Kid book at the book fair, which takes place from Nov. 17-20. Donations welcome!

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." 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.

700s are fun activities (aka Arts and Recreation)

900s are social studies (aka history and geography). Folk songs would be under music in the 700s.
However, this team explained that they thought folk songs were about culture,
which is social studies, which is 900s. Full credit for using their brains!

Here are the teams at work. I am happy to report that everyone participated fully, as the photos illustrate:

Double-checking the category labels posted at the front of the room.

 

 

* Original lesson idea from Anne Oelke via LMNet.

Opposites! Opposites! - Grade 1

After we read Earth, Sky, Wet Dry: A Book of Nature Opposites by Durga Bernhard and Yummy Yucky by Leslie Patricelli, Grade 1 students worked together to develop lists of opposites. They got some inspiration from this Sesame Street video, and had a stack of books to help with ideas as well.

Can your family fill in the table below with the missing words? Can you come up with more examples?

up
	cold
fast
	quiet
inside
	sad

Here are some of the kids hard at work:

Friday Morning Crosswords

I LOVE CROSSWORD PUZZLES. Through them, I've picked up a ton of vocabulary and trivia. They stretch your mind with puns, double meanings, and synonyms: a fantastic way to support the Common Core Anchor Standards for Language:

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.L.4 Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases by using context clues, analyzing meaningful word parts, and consulting general and specialized reference materials, as appropriate.
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.L.5 Demonstrate understanding of figurative language, word relationships, and nuances in word meanings.

On checkout days, I offer word and logic puzzles as an activity; students have one week to return them to me complete and correct. If they do, then they get a free book from the prize box. I was thrilled by how many kids worked together yesterday, using the dictionary, encyclopedia, and almanac to look up answers such as "October birthstone" (which is opal).

Here they are in action:

This group all finished before the end of class!
I think I'll be giving them a two-star difficulty puzzle next time.

Choosing from the prize box.