Iowa Children's Choice Award Library Center

In our libraries we have been encouraging kids to read and review the  Iowa Children's Choice Award Books before we vote in March. To give kids another opportunity to interact with the books, we have created a center of puzzles of the Iowa Children's Choice Award Book covers on Popsicle sticks. 

Newbery and Caldecott Winners and Honorees Announced!

The Newbery Award was given today to Katherine Applegate's book The One and Only Ivan, and the Caldecott Award was given to This is Not My Hat by Jon Klassen. Check out the summaries and information about the books from School Library Journal's blog. You can also see the honor books at their site, too. 

What do you think? Would you have chose these two titles as the award winners for the year? Or would you have liked to have seen any of the other honor books win the awards?

Our Own (Un)Interrupting Chickens

Students in K - 2 library classes heard all about the little red chicken's antics this week as we read Interrupting Chicken, by David Ezra Stein. The book is another one of the Iowa Goldfinch nominees for this year. A variety of activities supported their discussions about the book--thanks to Candlewick Press and BestChildren'sBooks.org for their great ideas and activities!

Kindergarten students drew pictures to show how they would not be interrupting chickens:

Students in 1st grade wrote out their ideas to keep from being interrupting chickens:  

And 2nd graders created their own interrupting chickens with advice to avoid being one themselves!

Cat Secrets

Cat Secrets by Jef Czekaj is one of the nominated Iowa Goldfinch Award books this year. One of the activities first and second grade students did was visit his website and contact Tucker the Cat, the writer of cat secrets for all cats. Below are the classes' emails (written by the students themselves) with their replies from Tucker (and translations from Jef!)

A response to one of Mrs. Ellis's 1st grade classes

A response to one of Mrs. Ellis's 2nd grade classes

Here's the picture Tucker mentions in his reply above. He asked if you could see him hiding. . . do you?

Tucker's reply to fan mail from South Prairie Elementary

How Many Do You Recognize?

Thanks to a post from buchlady at the Hiawatha Learning Center for this display idea. 

How's your knowledge of children's book characters? Can you name all of them?

It's Time for the Goldfinch Award Books!

At South Prairie Elementary and Dallas Center Elementary, it is time to start exploring the Goldfinch Award Books. In the next few weeks, students will read and interact with the nominated books- all to prepare to vote for their favorite in March. Students have a voice in choosing the state winner! We always love this time of year because we get to read a variety of really good books.

To start things off, we read one that has a very catchy title: Monsters Eat Whiny Children written by Bruce Eric Kaplan.
                                                               

We did a comparison to the events in the book Hansel and Gretel, by James Marshall.

James Marshall's adaptations are wonderful!

                                                                 
At the end, students did a retelling activity using pictures from the story- see below!

Retelling activity for Monsters Eat Whiny Children