Holiday Season Activities

It's that time of year! With the holidays approaching, we took a break from state award book activities to have a little holiday fun. Students participated in a variety of both technology-related and craft activities to spread holiday cheer.

Kindergarten
Time for some reindeer games with our youngest students! Students listened to a read aloud of Little Santa, as well as watched Olive the Other Reindeer before also watching a short Britannica Online video of reindeer in the wild. Students learned that 12-14 of them together can weigh as much as just one reindeer!

Then it was on to a craft, when students cut out and put together pieces of a reindeer to take home with them.

1st Grade

These students listened to Redbird at Rockefeller Center and watched a video to learn about the real holiday trees that have stood between Rockefeller Center and the world-famous skating rink for nearly 90 years. 

 Depending on the students' attendance centers, students then either created a holiday tree of their own, or they used the iPads to access the Quiver app to bring a tree "to life."

3rd - 5th Grade

Our older students also got into the holiday spirit with different holiday games shared with them through Google Classroom. Click on the caption below the picture to access the document.

ACCESS THE DOCUMENT HERE

Looking for more wintery Google activities? Try this post at ControlAltAchieve by Eric Curtis: 

Happy holidays from all of us at the DCG elementary libraries!

1st Grade Library Detectives

First graders at Heritage Elementary and Dallas Center Elementary have watched several book trailers this year featuring different detective series books, such as the Inspector Flytrap books, the Nate the Great series, and the Chicken Squad mysteries.






To continue our look at detectives, students did some of their own sleuthing around the libraries in both schools. We first read aloud a book from another great children's detective--Scooby Doo!

We talked about the work Scooby and the gang did while trying to solve the case and then compared it to the work in Nate the Great: The Case of the Fleeing Fang.

Nate the Great reminds us beginning detectives that you need to think, notice, work together, and remember when you work to solve a case. It was just these four things our 1st grade detectives did when they approached their first task: to decode different reading messages around the library.

Students first practiced decoding a message in the back of the Nate the Great book, then they set off in partner groups armed with the secret code (made from using the special characters in Google docs), magnifying glasses (because why not?!), and the paper (which included the visual hint as to location) to record their message.

          

Once students had begun their sleuthing, we continued with a scavenger hunt-type activity that had students first finding the clues around the library then finding books on the shelves that matched their clues.

Again, students worked with their same detective partners and used the magnifying glasses to help them in their search. Students recorded several different responses for the clues, as there were many books matching the clues from which to choose.

With all of the students' work around the libraries, they've become more comfortable looking for items throughout the space, and a few even wrote their own secret codes! Some great additional outcomes after an engaging few days in the library!