New Year Fun in the Libraries

Happy 2017, North Andover! This is shaping up to be a great year for our school libraries, as we re-focus on our book collections after a month of coding fun. We split the month into two sections, both devoted to promoting our fiction collections.

Grades K-1

Our youngest library friends spent some time talking about what makes a book a work of Fiction. We talked about how fiction usually has illustrations (as opposed to photographs), characters, and a story with a beginning, middle, and end. We read an example of a fiction story, like the one featured below!

Click here to find this in the MVLC catalog!

Then we worked on identifying whether or not books were fiction or something else in small groups!

Grades 2-3

Second and third graders were tasked with creating Story Maps of different stories. We talked about how almost every fictional story has these five elements: Title, Setting, Characters, "Problem", and "Solution". Once you can dissect a story into those five parts, it's easier to read & understand...and to write your own stories, too! We read a short story together and then students worked in pairs to read and analyze picture books. Some were pretty tricky!

Mrs. Ahearn liked sharing a story from In A Dark, Dark Room for this lesson.

Click here to find this in the Stevens Library catalog!

Grades 4-5

Fifth graders mapped out stories using a Plot Diagram worksheet in Google Classroom. We talked about how plots of fiction stories have a "rising action"/problem and a "falling action"/solution, as well as a climax (the most exciting part, where the story takes a sharp turn), a beginning and an end.

The students worked in pairs on the computers to complete plot diagrams for different picture books. 

Book Tasting!

By far the most exciting part of studying fiction has been our Book Tastings! The librarians created a "menu" for kids to sample parts of the library fiction collections that students might not otherwise have tried. Every class had a selection of books that were developmentally appropriate served as "courses" during the tasting. Kids got a book, analyzed the cover, read a few pages, and then decided if it was a book they might someday like to try. The idea being that every child would leave the library with a list of books that they could try out when next they had library check-out time.

Because we librarians like to make things fun, our book tastings were complete with music, table cloths, candles, trays - the works!

That's all for now, Library Detectives!

Gearing Up for and Participating In ... The Hour of Code

Lately, we have hit the pause button on our library sleuthing skills and tuned into our tech problem-solving skills to participate in the Hour of Code! Our library classrooms have been transformed into computer labs and our students into programmers. Using Chromebooks in our classes, we are able to get students engaged in coding games available from code.org. Students are now getting programming experience through special games available on the Hour of Code site that emphasize sequencing and order, conditional statements, and other habits of mind used when designing code.

Our kindergarten, first, and second grade classes are having fun with the game Kodable available on code.org. They get to tell the Smee character the right steps to navigate his way through the path in order to get to the next level. Each level requires students to provide step-by-step ordered instructions to the Smees, with each level getting progressively more complex.

In third, fourth, and fifth grade, students are challenging themselves to complete code in the Minecraft and Moana games. There are many opportunities to be creative and silly in Minecraft Designer, the code.org game where students are in charge of designing how their chickens and other characters will behave and what they will do. The Moana game, also available from code.org, has been a timely hit with many students as well, and provides students the opportunity to practice spatial skill-building by completing action-oriented and specific tasks.

 

Code.org/learn is a free site that you can use at home and has a wide range of games that introduce coding skills in a fun learning environment. Check it out!