Blogger Solution

If you have been wondering where I was...probably not, right? I was having trouble posting to blogger. I'm currently testing out an iPad and am without traditional Internet access via a laptop at home so I was posting to blogger from the iPad as I had done from the iPhone via Blogger in Draft. Then one day, it stopped working. And as I sometimes do in these situations, I ignored the problem and came back only to find the exact same result...again...and again. I finally figured out a work around just now. In regular blogger, I could not type in the content box. Again, I don't know why but on the iPhone and iPad this was just not a reality? But I could type in the HTML box. However I don't know code from Egyptian. In fact it all looks similar to me. But I have become proficient at using online code converters like the one I'm typing into right now. Www.htmlconvert.net Soooo, I will hit convert, it will spit out code at me. I will copy and paste and voila you will be able to read it here. It is about 7 more steps than it should be, but when don't I make more work for myself? Hopefully I'll be seeing you a little (no promises) more often in the near future.

Testing

Testing...if this works I have found a workaround to post on blogger. Though I feel like I am jumping through pretty ridiculous hoops. If it works, at least I can post.

The Serial Comma, Oxford, AND Inheritance Law

I just read THE news...about the Oxford/Serial comma. I'm not going to lie, when I saw buzz about this on twitter and lm_net, my brain was still in an ISTE haze and I thought the what, who comma? I finally got around to reading an article on the topic, found here: . And the sky is a little clearer now. I consider myself a word nerd and evidently a grammar junkie as well. I thought I did rather well with commas throughout high school and college, but when I wrote my action research for my Master's degree, one professor made this particular comma stand out, loud and clear in my brain for the rest of my days with one, simple, logical story.

First, she told us that in the world, this comma was not a big deal, BUT in her class it was. And here's why.

A lawyer friend of hers explained that if there was, for example, a will and an inheritance, that comma could mean a world of difference. So, Sally, Joe, and Mary are now splitting a $1000 inheritance. With the commas placed PROPERLY, each person gets an equal amount of the inheritance. BUT, if Sally, Joe and Mary are now splitting the same amount, Sally would inherit $500 and Joe and Mary (because they are not delineated with a comma and so are considered one entity) would split the remaining $500 and get $250 each.

See how that works? I'll bet you never look at a comma the same way again.

Author Visit Extraordinaire

In my attempt to catch up on events in out library since January, one of the big events that happened in April was our author visit with Debbie Dadey.  Debbie lives about a half hour from our school, making her an ideal choice for my first attempt at arranging an author visit.  In addition to her close proximity, she has an awesome collection of titles to her name, including The Adventures of Bailey School Kids, and she has an incredibly organized and user friendly website with step by step directions for setting up an author visit.  All of this combined to make it a relatively easy process.  I researched and booked our visit in November on the heels of our fall book fair.  I was in contact with Debbie through the intervening months, and found her to be kind, accommodating, and very personable.  

To prepare for our author visit, each grade level engaged in different activities, and each classroom decorated their door to reflect a different cover of a Debbie Dadey book.  Students and Teachers voted for their favorites and awards were given for "Teacher's Choice," "Student's Choice," and "Author's Choice."  I put Debbie on the spot a bit with that.  To facilitate voting, I took pictures of each door and made a photo album slideshow on our school library webpage in the author visit section.  I also created a voting form in Google Docs and walked students through the voting process during one cycle of library classes.  Teachers could vote for their favorite this way as well.

Kindergarten students talked about monsters during classes, had a read aloud from the first Bailey School Junior book: Ghosts Do Splash In Puddles, made their own puddle ghost craft, made newspaper monsters, read from Monster Goose (a good re yew of our nursery rhyme unit too!), and from the Emberley book: If You're A Monster and You Know It.  The song to accompany this book is available online and is linked to our library webpage under student projects.

First grade students discussed copyright and each found the example of copyright in a Debbie Dadey book.  Later, they made their own Debbie Dadey titles, like (Monster Name) Doesn't/Don't  (Action) and they gave copyrights to their titles.  First graders also had a read aloud from Vampires Don't Wear Polka Dots, and the Miss Nelson books, since Miss Viola Swamp is featured in the first chapter.

Second graders also made Debbie Dadey titles and stories to accompany their title ideas and 
read aloud from Vampires Don't Wear Polka Dots, Ghost Class, the first book in the Ghostville Elementary series, and other Debbie Dadey books.

Third Graders focused on characters from the books, making mini-biographies for the characters using a variety of different mediums: crayons, computer programs like kidpix, Tux Paint, and online programs like Voki.

Fourth graders tied in what they had learned about books being made into movies and had project choices including: making a movie poster, making a radio advertisement, and making a movie script based on one of the chapters from a Debbie Dadey book.  In addition to the other series mentioned, fourth and fifth graders also read aloud from the Keyholders series.

Fifth graders made advertising posters using glogster, an online, interactive program.  Students focused on one of Debbie's books to make their posters and focused on different elements based on a rubric.

Books were pre-ordered through Scholastic's author visit department and through Follett as well.  Debbie was able to sign many of the books in advance of the event since I was able to drive them over to her house prior to the big day.

Debbie's presentations were broken down to k-1, 2-3, and 4-5.  Each presentation was different and met the needs of the group to whom she was presenting.  The students read many of Debbie's books in advance of her author visit and continued to read the, following the presentation as well.  

It was hard to keep the books on the shelves, a "problem" any school librarian loves to have!  In addition to Debbie's website being user friendly in regards to arranging and setting up the author visit, Debbie also has ideas for lessons to accompany her books, some of which I used, but that any teacher could use in the classroom as well.  There is also a message board for students to post questions for Debbie that she does answer.

Summer Reading...In Progress

This year, at Pine Road, we are trying something different in regards to Summer Reading. We are Reading for the World Record. As of today, our school has recorded over 15,000 minutes toward our reading goal. Students are able to choose freely to read any book,or other reading material that they choose. There are lists available on our Summer Reading Page on the left hand side under Suggested Book Lists, including one created entirely by the students for the students.

I used a google docs form to enable students to submit their own suggestions and checked over the submissions. I edited students' names so that last names were kept private, but otherwise left there grammar and punctuation. Next year, I may do this with grades 3-5 instead of including 2nd because some of the younger students had difficulty with the form. I may brainstorm a different way for younger students to make peer recommendations but in order to effectively do so, I need to begin the process even earlier. The last day of school really snuck up on me. Teaching on a six day cycle with assemblies and other special events sprinkled through the last few weeks of school made it difficult to calculate the last cycle where I saw everyone before the end of the year. I will plan better for this next year.

Back to summer reading.

I love to read, and I hope to instill this same love for the children I teach. This summer, students are encouraged to read, read, and read some more. And that's it. (Well, that's not exactly it. I also expect them to play, swim, catch fireflies, eat s'mores, and generally have a great time.). But, as far as summer reading is concerned: no project. Suffice it to say, the kids were ok with this plan. And, if there were any dissenters, there are still project options on the webpage too. I'd like to add more options in the future for reader response in general, with more of an emphasis on book reviews. I'd like to use these options to help teachers throughout the school differentiate the way students respond to reading in the classroom. I'd also like to make this a space for teachers to share all the great things they are doing with students in this area throughout the school. Teachers have such great ideas and opportunities to share with one another are few and far between, so I'd love to facilitate a website that would enable teachers to share these ideas with each other.

Throughout this post, I've gotten a smudge side-tracked, but only because I am SO excited about what the future holds for our school library.

Back to summer reading...again.

This summer, I've read Tne Strange Case of Origami Yoda (excellent, and I made my own Yoda finger puppet), The Maze of Bones (also excellent - I will post more on this soon), and I'm just about to finish Schooled by Gordon Korman (and not to give away too much, but I will post on this and the extraordinary power of the student recommendation!). Up next on Audiobook is Dragonsdale, and in print is Room One by Andrew Clements. On the Nook, which I just got yesterday and will get a post all to itself, will be something from the public library once I get it all connected and registered and what not.

Second graders finished the year with a read aloud of The Incredible Book Eating Boy, and like its main character, I hope to devour quite a few books this year. You can follow my reading shelf at:

Enjoy all your summer reads!

#ISTE11 Reflections

I had the awesome opportunity to be a part of ISTE11, the conference of the International Society for Technology in Education the past three days. It was truly awesome to have such a HUGE conference hosted locally in Philadelphia. I feel I managed my time rather well and attended most, if not all, of the sessions I planned to. Twitter, and my PLN, helped me to catch anything I did miss. One of those missed opportunities was a flash mob. I have expressed many times that I would LOVE to be a part of a flash mob. The dancing kind, NOT the rioting kind. And what did I do? I was sitting in a room...learning. Which was also great, but come on now. There were double dream hands and shoulder, shoulder, shoulder. I'm disappointed in myself. Not for not blogging since February, because I was told specifically in the SIGMS (Special Interest Group for Media Specialists) Forum NOT to apologize for not blogging, because it is tiresome, which is true...but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed in myself for that too.

But back to dancing and learning.

My new favorite is fur.ly. Like bit.ly the URL shortener, fur.ly shortens a whole list of URLs. I've worked to build lists of links for students around topics, similar to pathfinders, but in this, my first year, those lists were very franticly thrown together, so I'm excited to revisit those lists and look at new and different ways to organize.

I attended sessions on Web Tools (another favorite is jam studio), Educational Activism (eh, not exactly what I was thinking), Teach with Tweet, Separating Truth from Fiction (a PERFECT social studies curriculum tie-in model lesson for info literacy for fifth graders, BUT if I tell you much more now it won't be much of a lesson at all), Teacher 2.0 (also different than I thought, but still great), SIGMS Forum (with several of my twitter librarian idols), Voice Thread (can't wait to use this more in the future), Taking Daily Announcements to the Big Screen (reassuring and invigorating with new ideas), Green Screen (presenter was sick, sub filled in...would have been better in a hands on model), Make It Work: Advocating for Your School Library (awesome!), and the closing keynote with Chris Lehman (double awesome).

That was a quick summary of the last three days of my life.

You can find links to anything presented on my diigo page here:



Excited to apply all these tools to my everyday teaching!

Strike a Pose

Third graders will be doing just that soon, following their biography wax museum project. We introduced biography right after winter break, discussing the project for language arts classes and the famous people that students remembered seeing in last year's wax museum. I discussed where the biography section was in our school library, how to search using the catalog, and how to best utilize the public library if a book was unavailable in our school. During the following class, we looked at Jerry Pinkney's work, wrapping up our unit on fables, and reviewing tall tales, and we looked at Brian Pinkney's biography: Happy Birthday, Martin Luther King. We also looked at how to search for more reading material on their selected person on reliable websites. During the next class, I introduced the online encyclopedia as a tool for more information AND as a tool to create timelines for the selected person's life. Following that, we elaborated more on biographies of famous slaves during the time of the underground railroad; focusing on two Caldecott honor books from illustrator Kadir Nelson: "Henry's Freedom Box" and "Moses", a story of Harriet Tubman. Next up is a lesson in preparation of Read Across America, a celebration of Dr. Seuss' birthday on March 2nd. Naturally, in keeping with the biography unit, we will discuss "The Boy on Fairfield Street", a biography of Dr. Seuss. From there, we will begin to look at the third grade centric books of our visiting author, Debbie Dadey, whose visit is quickly approaching April 2nd. Time sure does fly when you're having fun!