Summertime Wednesday Posts--"Remember When We…" Series

With summer break just beginning, it's time to think about what our summer posts will include. Why not a look back at some of our favorite lessons or activities?! Look for a new series of summer posts titled "Remember When We…" Wednesdays!

Our first look back features a 3rd grade lesson relating to book care from August 2012. You can read the original post here, but here's a screenshot to remind you of it:

A fun side note: These students will be 5th graders this fall, and so will their 3rd grade teacher, Mrs. Nims, who has transferred to a 5th grade position. Maybe some of them will be working and learning with her again!

Kindergartners & Book Care

The kindergartners have been talking about book care expectations. We read a book from the blog Kindergarten. . . Kindergarten; it was called Forest Friends go to School by Kathryn Warner, and it featured several pages of book pages that have been mistreated.

After reading and talking about the pages in the book, kindergartners created a class T-chart showing ways that we should treat our library books and the ways we should not treat them.

Marion the Hedgehog and Book Care

The book care lessons continued with our second graders reading and talking about Marion in What Happened to Marion's Book? by Brook Berg.

We first visited the National Geographic Kids website for hedgehog information. We learned about what a hedgehog looks like, where they live, and why it has spines. We even watched a video of a hedgehog!

Marion the Hedgehog, the main character in our story, is based on a true story, so we also visited Marion's official website to learn more about her past and her role as an author.

Finally, students worked in pairs to write a book care expectation on a hedgehog spine that later became part of a library display. Check out some of the students' work below: 

And their finished products:

Book Care and Library Expectations

At the start of the year, we take a lot of time to talk with our kindergartner and 1st grade students about book care and library expectations. Out of our "bag of tricks," we pulled items that would be good to use with our library books, as well as items we should probably keep away from our books.

Kindergarteners listened to No, David! by David Shannon as a way to reinforce making good and not-so-good decisions. We completed a handout about those decisions with our library books, too!

Our first graders took a look at several videos that featured our book friends as they shared their library expectations and book care suggestions. We heard from Al the Alligator, Scaredy Squirrel, and Skippyjon Jones!

After each video, students wrote about or drew a picture for one main idea about book care or library expectations--check out a few below:

Never Let a Ghost Borrow Your Library Book!

To start of the year, we talked with students about how to take good care of their library books. We read the book Never Let a Ghost Borrow Your Library Book by Karen Casale.

After reading the book, we asked students to consider themselves "deputized" as members of the Library Secret Service, and as such, we needed them to reinforce any of the Very Official Guidelines (VOGs) from the book.

Here are some of the students' book care suggestions:

Several of them are now on display with our LSS agent:

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Animals Should NOT Check Out Library Books!

After discussing book care and watching a presentation from the Elementary Library Routines wikispace about why animals should not check out library books, students in the third grade classes chose their own animals to write about and illustrated why they too should not check out library books.

Above, students in Mrs. Nims's class at Dallas Center Elementary 

show off their animal book care pages.