State Award Winners Announced

The Iowa Association of School Librarians met earlier this week and announced the winners of the Iowa book awards. Students across Iowa voted in March, including the elementary schools in DCG. Each building had winners, and today we learned which books were state-wide winners.

At Dallas Center Elementary, students in kindergarten through second grade chose Scaredy Squirrel has a Birthday Party, while students at South Prairie Elementary voted for The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore.

We learned today, though, that with over 25,000 votes cast statewide, the winner of the Iowa Goldfinch Award--with 3,554 votes--was Creepy Carrots by Aaron Reynolds.

Students in Grades 3 - 5 voted on the Iowa Children's Choice Award. To be eligible to cast a vote, students must have read at least two books from the nominations list. At Dallas Center Elementary, Athlete vs. Mathlete was the building winner, and at North Ridge, The Ghost of Graylock was the top vote-getter.

And how spot-on were our building winner? Our North Ridge students voted in line with thousands of other students, who also chose Dan Poblocki's book The Ghost of Graylock as the overall winner for the year.

Books for next year's lists have already been announced; see below for the posters and links to them to get a head start on reading. 

CLICK HERE to access the poster online.

CLICK HERE to access this poster online.

4th & 5th Grade Online Research and Presentation

Over the course of the last several cycles, 4th and 5th graders at Dallas Center Elementary have been completing an online research project in specific steps:

Step 1: Determine a topic
Students chose research topics of their choice with the only condition being that the topic be searchable in two of four different places--Wonderopolis.org, Britannica Online, TrueFLIX, and MackinVIA.

Step 2: Collect information

Once students' topics were decided upon, they began collecting information from both of their research sites. Students focused on any pictures and titles or headings, main ideas and details, and related vocabulary when taking notes. 

Step 3: Transfer notes 

Because the students' final project would be an electronic presentation, they created screenshots that compiled their hand-written notes into their choice of apps: Popplet, Skitch, EduCreations, or Write About.

Step 4: Create video presentation

The final step in this app smash research project was to create a video using the screenshots that included information from their note taking. Students used the app PuppetEDU to insert their images, add music, and possible narrate their work.

Some of the students' work appears below. Just click on the link in the caption below each picture to see the video in full.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/wugi9htz80pkwkm/21Video.MOV?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/z5hls5lp8hw20iq/19-Video.MOV?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/53y24d6m3fwji06/Video.15.MOV?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/290yj2v5rlelrr3/LVideo.MOV?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/kkxgdnhimbi7pdn/4Video.MOV?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/69psvda111132bs/Video-C.MOV?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/fx5rfopr06kn4gd/Video%2023.MOV?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/auq4hsrvkfou05i/Video-6.MOV?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rraedi3cyf86u10/VideoI.MOV?dl=0

Me. . . Jane Lesson Ideas

The last Iowa Goldfinch-nominated book that we looked at was Me. . . Jane by Patrick McDonnell.

To go along with this book, we paired a Reading Rainbow video that features Jane Goodall as an adult speaking about her experience with the chimpanzees in the African jungle.   

Another great book that pairs well with this lesson is The Watcher: Jane Goodall's Life with the Chimps by Jeanette Winters.

One of the activities we did with the students was to complete a handout asking students to identify an event that inspired Jane Goodall to become a scientist. The books and the video both lend themselves well to this. There are also some wonderful supplemental activities from Hachette Book Group, including a word search and coloring page.

One Cool (Iowa Goldfinch!) Friend

Another of the Iowa Goldfinch nominated books for the year is One Cool Friend by Toni Buzzeo and David Small.

After picture-walking a few pages of the story, we moved to the digital story that was available to use through our AEA's digital library.

As a follow-up activity, we went to PebbleGO to read and listen to some nonfiction texts about penguins.

Students then completed exit tickets to place on our classroom penguin. Their task was to write a fact they learned from the reading or to share one thing they thought was interesting about penguins.

Our classroom penguin has quite a lot of information on him--check it out!

I Want my Hat Back Activity

One of the year's Goldfinch nominees is I Want my Hat Back by Jon Klassen.




We paired this nominee with another Goldfinch book--Exclamation Mark by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. Our discussions focused on how authors and illustrators let us know we might read their books out loud by the words the choose, the pictures they draw, and the punctuation marks they include.



After reading the book and talking about how the characters might sound when they responded to Bear's question ("Have you seen my hat?"), students chose their own animals and made their own hats. All of our hat-wearing animals have found a place for themselves in our landscapes--check them out!

Below are some of the students proudly showing off their animals and hats.

The Snowy Day display

I really enjoy and believe in the benefits of creating whole school experiences for the kids. I do this every year with my Goldfinch Award books. I think there is something about 500+ kids reading the same book and being about to talk about it and connect to each other through this common ground. Right before Christmas, I was wanting to work on making connections with the students. I came up with the following lesson and what was created was so much better than what started in my head!

                    One Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats at South Prairie Elementary

I don't have any windows in the library, so I started my lesson by playing a youtube video of snow falling as the kids walked into the library. For some classes I had gentle snow falling, for others I'd show a snow storm; really, it just depended on my mood!

I had the kids go around and tell me one thing that came to their mind with the word "snow"- we turned it into a wordle. What I really like about wordle is that it will enlarge the words the more they are stated, so the kids get a quick visual of responses. 

Next, we read The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. I told the kids to look for things that they had mentioned from our Wordle. I also told them to pay attention to the illustrations in the book. When they were done, I told them that we were going to have our own snowy day illustrations. Here is what I provided for the kids:

1. I had taken their photo in groups of 5-6 the week before. I printed these out as 5x7 and cut them apart so that each kid got a pic of his/herself, but I wasn't wasting a lot of ink by doing individual pictures. 

2. I had silhouettes of the various "poses" that the boy in The Snowy Day has. Kids could choose one.

3. Scrap paper to make sleds or other props.

Kids made their snowy day "character" and then hung it on the snow hills I had put in the hallway. By the end, our snow hill was very crowded! But most importantly, kids in our building had a shared experience. They could look for their friends, see their classmates creativity, and instantly have their worked "published" for all to see!