First things first- we got our 12 new laptops (well, not new, but new to us) for the students to use in the library! Yea! We have some great people in the district that worked hard to help this happen for our school (thanks Ron Brown) and I couldn't be more grateful. For all of our future research projects we will be able to have enough computers for students to work in pairs without having to stagger and take turns. We've made it work, and been happy for what we've had, but we are thrilled to be able to maximize the time students have in the library using technology whenever we need it!
We were able to get much of our research project work done prior to Spring break, but not all. Our 3rd graders have completed their salmon project, comparing and contrasting the catching and use of salmon between 2 Native American tribes, connection to the social studies content for 3rd grade, as arranged with the 3rd grade team. The kids did a nice job and practiced creating Venn diagrams and constructing compare and contrast statements. The speech bubbles coming from the salmon remind everyone to cite their sources! This is a key part of doing any reliable research, allowing follow up on your research and giving credit to where you got your information!
This salmon has some attitude with his speech bubble, "Hey Bub, don't forget to site (cite) your sources," followed by the required information for a citation for the Social Studies Classroom Based Assessment given by our district.
4th and 5th graders should all be finished with their research next week. The 4th graders will be using their Lewis and Clark PowerPoint Slideshows to teach their classmates about the key social studies content they researched. They've created questions to quiz their classmates after each presentation is done and we will be using those questions again in a Jeopardy game once everyone has presented. I am incredible proud of these kids for their hard work. They have learned so much about the research process and the Lewis and Clark expedition!
Also the genre challenge continues for another 3 weeks, so parents, please be sure to check in with your kids again about where they are at in the process. Every student reaching level one for his or her grade level will earn a free Applebee's meal and be entered to win one of the bikes from the Mason's. In the photos below you can see the apples representing our genre level one winners and the golden cup is for those students that read ALL 15 genres and completed evidence sheets for each book read. Wow! They will be coming to a special party with pizza, ice cream, and prizes after the challenge ends.
Also, we just did our voting for the Washington Children's Choice Picture Book Award and recorded the votes with tally marks, so the 1st graders could practice counting them. The close up picture shows our school's winner, but will the rest of Washington state's kids agree? We'll see!
2nd graders will be taking a field trip soon to the Cashmere Pioneer Museum thanks to a grant we were awarded from Target. I applied for the grant on behalf of the second grade team and we were chosen! This grant will pay for transportation, entrance to the museum, to see how early settlers lived in our area, and supplemental books to help our 2nd graders do some research before they go on the trip. We've been very excited to discover what our library has to offer to learn about pioneers and we'll continue to research that over the next month!
0 comments:
Post a Comment