Dot Day Celebrations, 2016

Today is International Dot Day, and we've been celebrating all week long! Some of our South Prairie students participated in Google Hangouts with students at Dallas Center Elementary, sharing the alouds Mix It Up and The Adventures of Beekle the Unimaginary Friend.

After reading Mix It Up, Dallas Center Elementary students also read The Dot and "made their marks" with the app QuiverVision and the Dot Day coloring page.

To access the PDF, click here.

Students colored their dots, and with the app were able to see their dots become three dimensional. The app also creates images using their dots.

After reading about Beekle, our new partner classes--Mrs. Washington's 2nd graders and Mrs. Grant's 5th graders--created their own new unimaginary friends to share through the mail, and both groups are eager to read and work together again in future Google Hangouts!

Other first grade classes celebrated Dot Day by pairing Press Here with The Dot and then making their marks creating their own dot books.

Dallas Center Elementary fifth graders also celebrated Dot Day and made their marks digitally. After reading The Dot, students searched for dots all around the library, taking pictures of their finds. 

Then, using the app PicCollage, students created collages featuring all of their library dots. 

So much fun celebrating Dot Day again--be sure to look at our SnapChat and Instagram accounts (DCGLibraries) to see more pictures!

Press Here!

One of our Iowa Goldfinch Books for the year is Herve Tullet's Press Here.

To celebrate this book, and to get our students to think about the "characters" in the book, we handed out yellow, blue, and red dots so they could act out their characters' parts in the story.

During the read aloud, students rubbed--gently!--their dots, tapped them, and shook & leaned with them. Such fun--and we even read the book twice just like the dots suggest. :)

We also shared the Press Here app with students and some of the 15 different games you can play using it.

Among our students' favorite games were Memory, Inside Goal, and Drawing. Of course, we ended our time with Fireworks so we all could "ooohh!" and "aaahh!" over the app and the book!

Finally, students were able to make their own Press Here books using very basic supplies:

As the authors and illustrators of their own stories, students created wonderful examples of where their imaginations can take them!