What are the students up to?

So what have we been doing in the library lately? WELLLLL...

Kindergarteners have been working to finish up their Nursery Rhyme unit, including a bilingual book of several rhymes. We discovered some of the words were missing, so we had to glue in the correct words, matching the illustrations. Next week Mother Goose will be popping by to hear our Kinders perform the Nursery Rhymes we've learned.

First graders continued with the Fairy Tale unit, discovering a PERFECT example of a fairy tale (Sleeping Beauty) and others that had some, but not all, of the elements of a fairy tale. We've been graphing the genre we've been reading in our portfolios and we're getting lots of evidence sheets back for the genre challenge!

Second grade just finished up their mystery genre unit. We culminated by listening to book blurbs from some popular mystery series and analyzing what elements of a mystery we heard in those blurbs. It was clear that our students in second grade really know what makes a mystery a mystery!

Third graders have been learning about how reference books are tools we use to make our jobs easier. When discussing what keywords we might be able to use to begin our search process for our Native American salmon Super3 research project, we learned that a thesaurus can be a great tool for finding some synonyms to help us get better search results. We also know that a thesaurus is fantastic to help with our writing as well. We learned how the guide words help us find what we are looking for easily. How awesome that guide words are there in a thesaurus, dictionary and encyclopedia!

Fourth grade did some great work discovering possible research topics for the Lewis and Clark Big6 research project they are embarking on. After reviewing numerous print resources (and using the table of contents and index to help us), we discovered that the topic of Lewis and Clark is simply too big to do a thorough job. After discussing many ideas, our classes settled on dividing up topics related to Lewis and Clark and teaching each other. Each class created a list of possible topics and we will investigate them further before selecting our topic for each pair.

Fifth grade is working on their Big6 research project as well and since ours will be heavily relying on the Internet for resources, we need to become more critical users of the Internet. By examining a site on the endangered Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, created by the Wild Haggis Conservation Society, we learned that you have to be very careful trusting everything you see on the Internet!