March Madness!

March was another banner month for our libraries here in North Andover! I can't believe the month went by so fast! We're fast approaching our last few months of school, and we're still rolling out super fun and exciting library lessons for all grades!

Kindergarten - 1st Grade

Since many of the classes and schools have been focusing on Fairy Tales and retellings, we've continued our work with fairy tale books in the younger grades. We've focused a lot of our discussions on what the essential components or ingredients of each fairy tale are (for example, the essential components of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" are that someone sneaks into someone else's house and tries all their stuff!). Then, we've started talking about ways that some authors change some of the ingredients to make a new, fractured fairy tale! A new favorite story we've read has been The Frog Prince Continued by Jon Scieszka.

Click here to find this title in the Stevens Library collection! 

We talk about all the fairy tales that are mentioned in this book, and characters we recognize. It's been a big hit with kids and teachers!

With the 1st Graders, we've talked about those ingredients and used a graphic organizer to try and start using fairy tale ingredients to write their own fairytales - so far, it's going really well!

In some classes, we've also talked about Story Elements - what makes up the parts of a story? We read a story and map out the setting, characters, problem and solution. Understanding the components of a story is the first step towards being able to construct a new story!

2nd Grade

Our second graders have been working on finding Nonfiction Books in the Library using a fun scavenger hunt designed to help familiarize them with the information presented in our Online Catalog. Occasionally, we've been able to tie-in the books they're looking for with the subjects they're working on in class; other times, it's a general scavenger hunt for books about every second graders favorite thing: ANIMALS!

We've also begun using the chromebooks a bit more in the last half of the year with the second grade classes, with many teachers requesting either practice logging in or coding, or researching using the databases.

3rd Grade

Third graders got a taste of what April will be all about: poetry! We've been reading Hoops by Robert Burleigh, Follow Follow: A Book of Reverso Poems by Marilyn Singer, and a few selections from the Bill Martin Jr. Big Book of Poetry. After we talk about how poetry can be about anything that makes you feel, we got a chance to write a few of my personal favorite kind of poems - HAIKU! Some of the poems have been really wonderful - and hopefully will inspire some future poets to enter into our Poetry Contest happening this April!

4th-5th Grade

Our older grades have continued to use our online resources to help discover new information to help with research projects. Many classes are working on persuasive writing, so we talked about how using Kids InfoBits and the magazine and newspaper results will help them find opinion pieces to help them persuade one way or the other about a particular topic.

We've also continued exploring our Google software programs, with many classes either creating brochures using Google Docs or creating presentations using Google Slides.

Not to get too tech-heavy, we've also tried to incorporate a few read-alouds in there, and will be focusing a lot of our work on poetry in April to tie-in to National Poetry Month.

That's all for now, Library Detectives! See you soon!

February Library Fun

February was a whirlwind of library excitement, guys! Because it's a short month made even shorter by our February break, I'll be brief with our library re-cap.

K-2nd Grade

Our younger grades starting talking about fairy tales and folk tales in their classes, so we decided to carry on that discussion in the library. We read a lot of wonderful books, and talked about where to find fairy tales and folk tales in our library. The magic number or secret code is 398.2 - any library that uses the Dewey Decimal System will have their books in that section.

Now, a lot of kids asked, "Why are the fairy tales in with the information books? Aren't they made up?" The answer to that is - because fairy tales are so culturally significant, and because they are found across cultures and continents, they impact people in the same way history or geography might. That's why they get their own special section! 

Here are some of the titles we read:

Traditional Fairy/Folk Tales

Puss in Boots by Charles Perrault

Cinderella trans. by Marcia Brown

Why the Crab Has No Head by Barbara Knutson

Nontraditional Fairy/Folk Tales 

The Rough Face Girl by Rafe Martin

Cinder Edna by Ellen Jackson

3rd-5th Grade

The older grades and I have been supporting our work using Google Docs and Google Slides to organize our research. We've been using our Online Databases to discover new information, and we're starting to realize that Google might not be all it's cracked up to be! We've also re-opened our Code Studio work to continue learning about computer science and coding.

That's all for now, Library Detectives! Boy, this year is flying by!

January Review!

Wait, January's already over?! How did that happen?! I guess when you're bopping between five schools, time sure flies!

This past month we've been able to coordinate more of what's happening in the library with what's happening in classrooms at various grade levels, which has meant some more effective learning and support for classroom teachers! As always, I try to weave in general library and research skills with what kids are already learning, to provide just in time library instruction instead of just in case instruction.

Kindergarten/1st Grade

Our kindergarten classes are now all experts on the "Secret Code" for picture books ("It's the letter EEEEE!"), so we've begun talking about the other codes in our library. We've taken a look at some nonfiction books, and compared them with picture books about the same subject. For example, here are two books about bears - which one will tell a story, and which will give us information? We then talked about things we already knew about bears, and used the text features in the nonfiction books (the table of contents, the glossary, and the index) to find out what we wanted to know about bears. Aftewards, we read A Visitor for Bear and compared what we'd learned about bears to how the bear acted in the story - what was the same? What was different?

Click to find this in the Stevens Memorial Library catalog!

In some classes, we've also done a lesson on Judging a Book By It's Cover. Even thought most things you shouldn't judge by their appearance (people, burritos, etc.), a picture book's cover can often tell you lots of great information about what the book is going to be about! We read 3-4 books and before each one, we made predictions about what the book would be about, and how it would make us feel; after reading, we'd compare what happened with our predictions. The clear favorite of all the books we read was Tap the Magic Tree by Christie Matheson:

Click to find this in the Stevens Memorial Library catalog!

2nd Grade

The second graders got a chance to try out some old-fashioned library detective work as we used nonfiction books to explore information about animals. Some of the older grades had used the databases to look up information on different kinds of animals, so I figured having the second graders practice with books was a great transition!

Most of our school libraries have animal encyclopedias, so we talked about how an encyclopedia is a different kind of nonfiction book - it's a reference material that we use to quickly look up information, and we don't have to read the whole thing to get what we need! I was very impressed by how excited the kids were about choosing an animal, and using the text features to figure out what that animal ate and where that animal lives.

3rd Grade

The third graders and I have been doing a bit of research online, and that's lead to a discussion about plagiarism. While certainly not a huge problem in grade school, plagiarism is a concept that even high school and college students struggle to understand; therefore, it's important that we get kids thinking early about what it means to give credit to sources, and to make sure they understand the difference between learning and copying information. For this lesson, I used a lot of resources from Common Sense Media, a wonderful website for parents and teachers that includes information on age-appropriate media for kids and digital safety!

4th & 5th Grade

The oldest grades have been working on practicing using our online databases to do research, as well as creating Google Presentations and Organizing our Research. We've also been getting a sneak peak at creating Works Cited pages, something that's required of all 6th graders. The idea is, the more we reinforce the importance of proper citations, the less trouble students will have in middle and high school.

Here's the citation page they use at the middle school:

That's all for now, library detectives! Have a great February break!