February Fun

Our information center is busy, busy, busy! That's just the way I like it. We are hosting a wide variety of activities this month: book promotions, class visits for circulation, "CIA" or curriculum enrichment, Battle of the Books workouts, computer lab activities and research with various groups.

Here is a photo highlight of some of February's Fun:


Our small but powerful BOB team works hard to categorize book themes.




Our Black History Month display is getting some attention. I need to keep this stocked often.



Thanks, Pinterest, for this idea! Blind Date with a Book is going well! The kids love it!

 

Our fines and fees go to a good cause - fresh books for our collection!



My CIA student turned in a project early! They have a choice of three options:
from their novel reading, they create a magazine review with alternate book cover (above), Voicethread book trailer, or script and record a video TV interview. Our alternate group is creating picture books from non-fiction themes.

 

Adopt-a-book is a repeat from last year.
Students can win a prize for giving your time and attention to an unloved book.
These have not been checked out in two years.

I'm gearing up for our Hobbit-themed book fair, coming up in March! Our Student Crew already had their first meeting and is working to promote the fun. We have a lofty goal of $5800.00 in sales this year. Can we do it?





Civil War research

Our 8th grade just finished studying the U.S. Civil War. They used our resource center for two weeks for primary and secondary, print and online resources to create a well-rounded learning experience.

Using some art supplies to create Ft. Sumter

Checking out some primary resources on an ancestry website

Union soldiers invade by boat

Using National Archives online to find primary resources

LearnNC has some great resource links too!

Reading Enrichment

     We have been busy in the media center! Our information center is teeming with activity recently.

     Our new CIA group (CIA4) is starting a second week of reading enrichment. I am experimenting with free choice reading in groups. It's a concept used by Ariel Sacks, a Brooklyn, N.Y. 7th grade English teacher. CIA is a 30-minute, daily, school-wide enrichment/remediation period. My group was selected by their reading Lexile range and by passing the Reading EOG last year.

     My goal is to provide deeper reading experiences through daily silent, sustained reading time. With our standard large classroom sizes and multiple ability groups, classroom teachers struggle to meet the needs of everyone at once. In CIA, our group has an opportunity to get some peaceful reading time with books connected to their own reading interests. Students filled out an interest survey on the first day. I grouped them by similar interests and Lexile numbers, then paired them in small groups with books of similar subjects. The last 10 minutes of class consists of an activity and journal entry.

     On the first week, half the class did not turn in any work. Some groups could not agree on books they wanted to read. Many rejected the selections matched to their interests. Some spent their reading time off-task. It was time to regroup!

     It took an entire day, but I called each parent of those who did not turn in work. We worked together to support their child in finding reading success. The result was worth the hard work! After splitting the large group of 29 into two smaller groups, I gave them separate assignments.

     Our "Printz" group (named after the Michael L. Printz Excellence in Young Adult Literature Award) was able to shift out of groups and switch into novels of interest. Some chose to continue in their groups, others selected new materials and shifted to different groups.

     Our "Newbery" group (named after the Newbery Medal, to the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children) was a smaller group who chose an article of interest from a variety of non-fiction Scholastic magazines.
You can view the lesson details here.

     We continue our journey toward instilling a love of reading. Sharing reading experiences is a wonderful way to connect with text. Let's see what adventures lie ahead!

    

    

Celebrating Success

Food Collected by collaboration with our Student Council

We had a Food for Fines Program in the media center this holiday season.

Students could opt to pay for their fines or lost books with cans or boxes of food. 

We collected over $100.00 worth of fines in food for the local food bank.

The effort was in collaboration with our Student Council. 

Battling with Davis Drive 

Our small but mighty team has been working hard reading, working on their  quizzes, and memorizing title and authors.

We have also been practicing our battles with Heritage Middle, Apex Middle and Davis Drive Middle. It really helps the team stay calm during the actual battle and be prepared for some tough competition.

We will begin profiling books next week by outlining major characters, plots, summaries and conflicts. Hopefully, this will keep the details clear for the team. The competition is only 7 meetings away! 

We meet online in Edmodo to talk to each other about books, related news and add questions. Our goal is to participate in the second round of the competition. Go! Big, Bad, Book Bosses!

Voicethread Expedition

Why are we doing this?

     Week four with my new enrichment group is already here. After polling our 8th grade teachers across subject areas, I decided our new focus would be vocabulary skills. Vocabulary skills? I thought it was a poor idea before I got started. I could envision the teeth-sucking, eye-rolling, chair-flipping and general anarchy erupting among the group.

     I'm thankful to report, aside of minor grumbling, my students are engaged in vocabulary-focused research and information processing. Our first week focused on prefix meanings. We worked in groups to uncover the meaning of unknown words, based on their prefix meaning. The students made educated guesses, adding them to a large chart at each table. They debated about their individual guesses, then verified against a dictionary. At the end of the week, we learned how to play Balderdash. I was excited to see the students make thoughtful definitions, based on their knowledge of prefix meanings! Not one student had played before and all seemed to enjoy the fun.

     I dedicated the second week to American Revolution vocabulary. Our first day included a pre-assessment of 10 terms from the 15 we would study throughout the week. Most students didn't know the terms, but that's why we do a pre-assessment, right? I was delighted to share a Schoolhouse Rock video, No More Kings, to summarize the American Revolution in an interesting way. I asked students to pick out some vocabulary terms they recognized in the video and infer the correct definitions.

     They were thrilled to spend the rest of the week in the computer lab. I used an existing Quizlet.com on American Revolution terms. They were chatty, but after I re-focused them, they used the tool to learn the terms, learn to spell them, quiz themselves and play games with the vocabulary terms. On the last day, they took a post-assessment on the Quizlet. After only three days (30 minute periods), 75% of the students earned a 100%! Many were 'competing' to see who could earn the first perfect score. Those who earned less than perfect tried again and improved each time. I wouldn't call this a lesson with deep meaning, but they do remember the Proclaimation of 1763 now.

     We spent the last two weeks learning how to extract meaning from complex text. Upping the ante, I switched to chemistry terms for this process. Students learned how to search the EBSCO database by Lexile level and Boolean operators. They needed to find their term, summarize the article as related to the term, find an example (quote) of the term, then make an inferred defintition with textual evidence. Of course, they were expected to cite their resources. Each student had two terms, each requiring two sources. They will spend this week on an expidition into VoiceThread.
    
     Voicethread is newly-acquired on a county level; I've never used it in a classroom setting. I shared with the class that I don't know how this will work on a class level, but was hoping to get their support in this new adventure. It will be sloppy. It certainly won't be perfect. We'll all make mistakes, but we'll do it together and be the model for the rest of our students at WMS. "We're alpha testing Voicethread guys, isn't that exciting?"

     Some grunts and a few crooked smiles were reassurance enough for me. The first day was slightly messy, but the students and I worked past the end of class without once looking at the clock. I'll consider that a success.

Adventures in a Common Core Experiment

Like any educator worth their salt, I question my ability to provide the best opportunities for my students every day. In the last four weeks, something wonderful has happened in our media center: students were actively engaged in meeting their curriculum objective. What's the most amazing piece of this puzzle? They knew it wasn't going to be graded.

I have a group of engaged, inquisitive, creative and thoughtful 8th graders who are attending my four-week enrichment session called Inquiry Learning and Research Skills. Our objectives tied in ITES Standards for Research Process, Sources of Information and Technology as a Tool. They met standards for the 8th grade Language Arts Social Justice unit. This is a snapshot of their process:

Week 1: Students met each other, then were placed in five small groups (5-6). I presented their objectives, Essential Questions and thematic focus. I showed the groups different at-issue themes from our resources in the media center. Groups selected three of their own choice. I selected one of their choices for their theme. Ms. Hetzell, our AG coordinator, helped in groups two days in each of the first two weeks. We worked collaboratively to assist students in research by helping students analyze information for credibility, bias, quality, authorship and timeliness. They used a variety of formats (online video, journal databases, magazines, newspapers and non-fiction text, plus interviews)

Week 2: Student groups met to discuss their first week findings, discard information that did not meet criteria, then agree on their focus within the group. They reasearched all week, taking notes, citing sources and discussing their findings. Homework was never required, but many chose to work outside of class on their research. (victory!)

Week 3: After finishing up research and completing citations, students worked in groups to choose one representative icon of their theme for each member of the group. This discussion lasted one class period, and they had some wonderful converstations!

We spent one period learning about murals and how they are used locally, nationally and globally. We looked at examples from Clayton, NC, Philadelphia, PA and Belfast, Ireland. Students noted how murals reflect perspectives of community and politics.

On the next day, we took a 'field trip' on school grounds, using our ipads to create the iconic images with the camera application. Student groups used transparency sheets and a dry erase marker to create contour drawings of their icons, then projected them to a 'mural' sheet, using an overhead projector.

Week 4: Students individually write summaries of their perspective on the issue, based on their research. They will need to reference their sources in their arguments; it will be a challenge! The final product will be their murals with their individual perspectives pasted (literally) around the images for a collective piece of artwork and writing.

This was a time-consuming and resource-rich project. It was very successful, which I attribute to allowing students to have choice in their learning. It made it a meaningful, enriched and exciting learning experience. I'll hear their reflections and take a plus/delta survey next to learn what the students thought about this project, and I'll be sad to see them leave to their next enrichment adventure.

I wonder what I'll do with my next four weeks and my new group of students?