We've Been Busy!

It's been a whirlwind of a trimester - there's been a lot going on in our school library!
Here's just a sampling of what we've been up to, by grade level.

Kindergarten

After learning about how to take care of books in the first few weeks, we began reading stories with patterns in them. To name a few:
     The Scarecrow's Hat by Ken Brown,
 This is the House That Jack Built by Simms Tabak

Grade 1

After reviewing book care, we learned how to use library shelf markers, which means first graders can go into the stacks themselves to look for books. We did a Cinderella Unit, starting with the French version:
 Cinderella, retold by Barbara McClintock, by Charles Perrault
and continuing with a different version each week, including:
 Yeh Shen: A Cinderella Story from China retold by Ai-Ling Louie

Grade 2

We began reading Trickster Tales, which are folktales in which a smaller, less powerful person or animal wins against stronger, more powerful characters by using their wits. We read:
Borreguita and the Coyote By Verna Aardema
Love and Roast Chicken: A Trickster Tale from the Andes Mountains, by Barbara Knutson
Anansi and the Talking Melon retold by Eric A. Kimmel
The Sacred Banana Leaf by Nathan Kumar Scott
Please Malese: A Trickster Tale from Haiti

Grades 3 and 4:

We began a unit on Digital Citizenship, and started with learning more about what the internet is:

After viewing this, we realized that on the internet, we are literally connected to the world, and therefore need to be safe and protect ourselves and our personal information.

We've done a number of Digital Citizenship Lessons (from Commonsense Media) this trimester. Many of our students play online games in which they can speak to others online. More than one student in each class has had the experience of others being unkind in these games. We talked quite a bit about why someone, especially and anonymous someone, might be mean to others, and how to handle such situations. We hope to create a safe and kind online world by learning how to be good digital citizens. But we also talked about strategies: stepping away, reporting and/or ignoring those who are not being good online community members.

What else is going on in the Library?

This year, a bulletin board was added near the story area called the "Research Parking Lot":

The purpose of the Research Parking lot is to jot down the excellent, curious  (often brilliant) questions that students ask during stories and lessons, questions which require some research to answer. Since our time for lessons in library is very short, we write each question on a bus and "park it" until a student chooses to do the research to present back to the class at a later time. In this way, we can honor student questions and curiosity, following up on them at a later time as a class. As you can see, the very first question came from our lesson about the internet, specifically the underwater cables that connect continents. A student wondered how those cables are placed underwater, and another student researched the answer for our class!