Owl Babies

I've tried checking books out to students for the summer, and with my school population, it didn't work out too well. Too many of my kiddos move unexpectedly, or travel long distances between family members. As a result, I must find interesting and meaningful activities for the kids to complete during the times when they would ordinarily be browsing. One such project is making these cute Owl Baby puppets out of envelopes. The kids love puppets of any kind, and these are fun to color and personify. I use them with the following books:

And here's how to make the owl handpuppets:

You can download the envelope file for printing HERE (microsoft Publisher) or HERE (PDF)

15 seconds of fame

Hawthorne Elementary upgrades library with digital activities



Lucky Me!

The Missoulian came and did a piece on me this week.  the reporter did a wonderful job distilling our hour-long interview into a readable and interesting piece.  The photographer came the following day.  Although he spent an hour and took hundreds of photographs, he managed to choose some pretty cranky-looking images.  Ah well.

It's always nice to advocate for my field as best as I can.  I feel that some of my colleagues are probably more articulate than I am, but none of them are more enthusiastic!  I truly love my job, and feel pretty passionately about how important libraries can be in schools.

Voice Thread for the Treasure State Book Award

I used to love Voice Thread.  I always used it for the students to comment on the titles nominated for the annual Treasure State Award.  Now, I am unable to log in on more than one device, so it has turned into an activity that we all do as a class, instead of letting the students work independently.

So, really, the advantages of using Voice Thread are diminished.  If I want to use it with more than one person at a time, I have to pay $80 a year.  I may as well use ThingLink, LinoIt or Padlet- at least I can embed those tools!

Just for this year, I decided to go ahead and use VoiceThread for this year's project.  The students get to record their thoughts on each of the 4 titles we read, then we vote for the book we love most. This year, the overwhelming favorite was Jangles by David Shannon

QR Code Poetry Readings

The 4th and 5th graders have been working with our poet in residence, and have built up nice portfolios.  After spring break, I will have the kids make audio recordings of their poems on the ipods and email them to my Dropbox account.  From there I will get a public link and paste the link into a Google doc.  The Google doc has a bit of script that automatically generates a QR code for each URL.  I print the codes and pass them out.

The kids glue them onto posters advertising their poetry.  The reading community scans the code to hear the poem.  I loaned out devices, but borrowers had to leave their shoes as collateral!

Kids also made cards for National Poetry Week to leave for random people at local restaurants. Each card had a code for people to scan, as well as a greeting from the reader.  I hope they brightened someone's day!

Abc Order

I have so many favorite Alphabet books! At this point in the year, I like to think that most of my kindergartners have mastered the letter names and sounds, and are ready to master other skills related to the alphabet, namely putting the letters in alphabetical order.

 To this end, today we will play an active little whole-brain game that I call Too far, not far enough...
The Rules:
 Post an alphabet strip on both sides of the room. (Older kids won't need this)
 Choose one child to be "it". They turn their back to the whiteboard(to start, choose one who is pretty confident with ABC order)
 I write a letter on the whiteboard (eg; "F")
 "it" guesses a letter. (eg; "S") Class jumps up. (S is "too far")
 "it" guesses again. (eg; D) Class squats down (the guess is "not far enough" or occurs too early in the alphabet.
Play continues until "it" guesses the correct letter.


I also use an ipod app that has draw-by-number AND draw-by-ABC order connect-the dot puzzles.
 It's called Kids Connect.  The kids love a chance to play with the ipods.  The letters and numbers are teensy weensy, but that doesn't seem to be a problem for anyone but me!

Yearbook

Each year I have the kids put together a 5th grade class yearbook.  I am hoping that I can get these together and ordered before the end of next week so that the print copies will arrive before school lets out.
This is the rubric I use to assess their biographical sketches, and a link to last year's yearbook:

2013 Hawthorne School Yearbook

By michele nokleby in Student Publications

54 pages, published 6/5/2013

The 5th graders from Hawthorne Elementary put together a yearbook every spring. This the 2013 iteration.

Pancakes For Supper : A springtime story

I love the first day of spring.  It's my anniversary, and When the winter has been particularly dreary, the Vernal Equinox reminds me that summer will be right around the corner. 

A great story for the first day of spring is Pancakes For Supper by Anne Isaac's, with fantastic illustrations from Mark Teague.. It's early spring and the sap is running.  Poor Toby has been bounced off the wagon and is lost in the woods, where wild animals want to eat her up.  She manages to trade various items of her new clothing for her freedom.  Ultimately, the animals argue over which one looks the best in the finery.  They chase each other around a tree so fiercely that they melt.  The maple tree wakes and the maple sap begins to run.  Toby is able to get all her new clothes back and the family enjoys a big pancake supper with maple syrup.

This story is a cute retelling of Little Black Sambo, a story that has been exiled from most library shelves long ago, due to its racial insensitivity.  Isaac's version is well-told, and more suitable. It is especially appealing to my audience, since the animals involved are all Montana residents.  It has all the elements I love in a read-aloud story: repeating phrases, embedded songs, and lots of different characters for me to make up voices for!

I plan to have my kindergartners make animal spinners as a special story-time prize to take home. They will cut out the animal "wheel" and glue it to the top of an old CD that I have prepared ahead of time.  Making a spinning toy from an old CD and a penny is a trick I learned from this wonderful website from India. They will love playing with their spinning animals! 

PDF for Pancakes for supper

All the Ants Wear Green Pants on St. Patrick's Day.

(Illustration from Stephen Sheen's delightful story: Miggie Gets Some Pants)

One of the more ridiculous and amusing activities I roll out every March is my kindergarten rhyming emergent reader about animals getting dressed for St. Patrick's Day.  I like to sing the rhymes to the tune of (Mary Had a Little Lamb)
I have a "big" flannel board version of the rhyme that I made.  The kids love dressing the animals as we sing.

All the ants wear green pants, wear green pants, wear green pantsAll the ants wear green pants for St. Patrick's Day

The ants wear green pants...
The pigs wear green wigs...
The cats wear green hats...

and... you get the idea.

The kids have trouble with the crows (bows) and the ewes (shoes), but they love learning new words.
Print the poem in a fold-able quarter-page sized book here:
odd pages  even pages


Other activities related to the holiday include
3rd/4th grade: writing "Green Poetry" in Word, then formatting and adding clip art.
2nd grade:  drawing leprechauns according to a glyph

March is the Month for Thinking Green

I decided that I really need to give my students more experience working with Microsoft Word.  I am more of a Google Doc girl, but I know their teachers will expect them to be able to create a simple document.
With this in mind, Ihad mys students in 3rd grade to think of things that made them think "green".  Then I read the poem "Grreen" from Hailstones & Halibut Bones.(Mary O'Neill, 1951)

They love these color poems.  I quickly showed them how to open a blank document so they could write their own "green poems".  I showed them how to use spell check, format the text, changing fonts, sizes, colors, use the centering tool, and finally how to insert, re size, and position clip art.  Finally, the kids were able to select a printer and generate a hard copy of their work.  ALL of this in 10 minutes or less, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that the students did quite well.  Part of the reason for success, is that the kids weren't allowed to do ANY formatting or clip art until their poem was done.  (quite a motivator)!

Green is ...

Like a long field at sunset

Like a pickle fresh from the jar

Like green beans and broccoli

And maybe a new car

Like grass around a tree

and some leaves

But just remember green green green

(Ashlyn)

The kids loved this "quick & dirty" project, and it gave them a much needed review of basic Word commands as well as a little keyboarding practice.  The kids also "remembered" how much they enjoy poetry books!

Library Badges

I've been experimenting with a new reading incentive idea:  BADGES!  So far, the kids are pretty excited about it.  One of the parents came in to tell me that I "hit it out of the park with this one".  I can tell that I a have made a fair amount of work for myself with this project, however.  I will need to recruit some volunteer help to iron on patches, hang up projects, and send stuff home after it's been displayed for awhile.

I made accounts on ClassBadges.com for each grade, and on my take home materials, I invited parents to make accounts for their children.  For 5th graders, I showed the kids how to make accounts themselves.

I sent home a Badge "Guidebook" detailing a project for the kids to do with each genre.  I also have badges for some of the activities we do on a "Flipped Classroom" model... in other words, activities

that require students to log in on their own time in order to truly excel.  For example, my favorite badge is keyboarding:

and the coding badge:

If I were to do it again, I would make more of the badges harder to get!

Digital Learning Awareness Week

The first week of February has been designated as Digital Learning Awareness Week.  Hawthorne is one of only two Montana schools to have registered as participants on the official website  At Hawthorne we are excited about educational technology and are wanting to share our projects and passions!

Our students are celebrating the week with a variety of digital projects. At Hawthorne, we are fortunate to have access to a computer lab, a mobile netbook lab, ipads, and ipods.  With this electronic equipment at our disposal, students are motivated to learn new content and share their learning in engaging, creative ways.

Fifth graders are posting their opinions on the debate between keyboarding and cursive instruction on their blogs.  Fourth graders are posting about how digital technology has impacted their lives. The kids love to express their opinions and look forward to any comments or questions they receive on their blogs.

Third graders have been learning about biographies.  Each student chose a famous person to research, using on-line sources as well as books to gather information.  Using the ipads, they made delightful animated “Talking Head” videos of their subject, providing a first-person narrative audio track.

Second graders are attempting to digitize their existing manuscripts, scanning illustrations, importing them into a slide show app (30 Hands), then recording their voices reading each page. The same app allows first graders to take photos to create a digital book talk video to showcase some favorite titles from our school library.

Kindergarteners display their mastery of the computer mouse by creating digital artwork and saving it to a file as directed.  With help, they will be able to make a group slide show of their art, accompanied by music and their sweet voices talking about their work.

Hawthorne school will be sharing these projects and many more from our Facebook and Twitter feeds, as well as our webpage.  We invite you to take a look!

FaceBook: Hawthorne School Library

Twitter: @HawthorneReads

web: www.mcpsmt.org/HawthorneLibrary

The Little Orange House- A story to cut & tell

Storytelling is a lot of fun, but when a child tells a story, there are important skills being developed, such as sequencing, oral expression, fluency, memory, and vocabulary. Additionally, sharing stories grows confidence and builds relationships. I try to offer many varied opportunities for students to tell stories in the library. I learned the story of the Little Orange House when I was young, and have retold it many times over the years, to the delight and surprise of the kids. They practice telling the story to each other, and then (with any luck) they will retell the story enough times outside of school to make the story their own. I made the template below so that my littlest students can get a little help from their grown-ups. Even kindergartners can tell this story if they get started cutting on the folded end of the paper! To download a template, click HERE. You will notice that the instructions are printed upside down, this is an effort to get folks to cut UP from the FOLD.

Putting Tired, Old Words To Rest

4th graders used the thesaurus to look up overused words, then they created custom gravestones online. The gravestones all indicate what words replaced the "dead" word. The kids really enjoyed this, and it would be a nice little mini-research activity for famous people of the past as well (Date of birth, death, significant achievements) Tombstone generators: http://www.tombstonebuilder.com/ http://www.futuregravestone.com/index.php (more ads here) I tried to put all the gravestones together into a slideshow, but almost every slideshow tool is now BLOCKED by our filtering software. This Animoto version will have to suffice!

Kindergarten Writing Folders

I have two little groups of Kindergarteners who visit me for half an hour each. I am supposed to be offering enrichment activities. I've been having them practice their writing. The invented spelling they use is so adorable. For inspiration on best practices, Ive been using Marvelous MiniLessons for Teaching Beginning Writing, k-3 (Rog) I wanted an idea board inside each child's folder, so I made the one you see above.

SUMDOG

One of my techie friends at a local school challenged us in a mathematical contest using SUMDOG. I'd registered a while ago, but hadn't loaded my students until now. Today I introduced it to a class of 2nd graders and a class of 5th graders and they loved it! Several of the kids wrote down their log-in information so they can play at home. It was the perfect activity for the kids today because it's only a 3-day week, and I didn't want to start any new grade-level projects, since I won't see the other classes this week. Kids log in and play a series of math games against other players who are logged in at the time, or a "robot". They earn coins depending on how accurate they are. I can choose how hard the problems are, or even dictate a specific type of problems (coin values, for example)

Halloween slide show

I know it seems simple, but many skills were at work when the 2nd graders created this Halloween movie for you. Logging in, opening a program as directed, using toolbars, using the keyboard, and phonetic awareness (The invented spelling is part of the charm!) This is a fun project to share with parents.

Digital Citizenship Projects

The fourth & fifth graders have been learning about the school Acceptable Use Policy, and digital citizenship in general. To share their learning, the students did a couple fun things... 4th Graders shared ideas on a digital bulletin board, created with Linoit. I really like this tool, because it allows all the kids to express their ideas to the group, also, they strive to think of information that hasn't yet been shared, so they are really racking their brains. Linoit is easy to use, but I wish our school didn't block access to Padlet, which is an even nicer tool!

5th graders each made a Voki to tell about a computer rule. They LOVED using Voki, and were very pleased to have their creations shared on the school web page. This was a very engaging approach to teaching this material. Here's an example:

Kindergarten Computer Skills

The Kindergartners LOVE to use the computers. I have a number of sites that I direct them to from my webpage, but I mostly like to teach them creative skills. I start the year by reading Lunch, by Denise Fleming.

This is a fun, simple and quick story about a little mouse who makes a colorful mess. I then show them how to make a "Mouse Mess" of their own using TuxPaint on the computer. I encourage them to use a lot of different colors and brush styles, jsut to practice using the mouse. For many of them, thisis their first experience using a computer.

I give them each a little paper mouse to take home... a computer mouse on one side, and a storybook mouse on the other. The dots you see represent the stickers I place on the Left Click side of the mouse, so the kids know where to rest their index finger.

A pdf of the mouse pattern can be found HERE.

Library shelf-markers and book bags

To keep the library running smoothly, every librarian has their own "Bag of Tricks".  Here are a couple procedures I have adopted to retain my sanity...

Shelf-markers:  kids use them to keep track of what shelf they take a book from.  I made these out of flexible plastic cutting boards (2 for a dollar at Ace Hardware!) each cutting board makes 4 shelf markers.  I decorated them with stickers and numbered them in case I ever want to assign them.  

I also make all the kids keep their books in a book bag, which has greatly reduced loss and damage.  I use these for grades K-3, and it's one of the best things I've ever done to keep things organized.  The kids don't have to wait in line for checkout, they just fill their bags, and leave them with me.  I do the checkout at my leisure (or have a volunteer do it for me, if I'm lucky). and deliver the bags to the classroom later in the day (or the next morning)

Smore : a new tool

So I have discover a new tool for making mini web pages and very cool posters.  Now I am trying to decide how or why or if this might be useful in my teaching.  Just to try it out, I made a page for a book I recently read, embedding a You-tube video, an image, and a quote.  I must say, it looks pretty good.

One thing that would make it good for using with kids, is that there are a limited number of design options.  Sometimes this is helpful for kids who might otherwise become paralyzed with indecision when faced with too many decisions (kids like myself!)

Another thing I liked is that the elements in each page are added with individual components that are modified one-at-time.  This sense of incremental  building is helpful for kids, in that they can manage one part of a project at a time, and won't get overwhelmed by what may seem an enormous task.
The projects can be shared on a variety of social media sites with one click, emailed, or embedded into a web page.  I composed my project on the ipad, and I did have trouble getting the embed code from within Safari.  So, for now I am just posting the link, and will embed using the laptop.

so here is the embedded version, you must click on it to scroll down.