Central Library News & Views

Our online library catalog has a new look and many new features.  This new catalog is called “Destiny” and our students are destined to find it easy to use and full of great information.  The first great feature (called Title Peek) displays a picture of a book’s cover next to its description.  

Gerald the Elephant and Piggie are different in many ways but they are the best of friends.  They are also the new best friends of our Kindergarten library classes. 

Together we read 4 of these hilarious books by Mo Willems: My Friend is Sad, I am Invited to a Party, Today I Will Fly, and the 2008 Theodore Seuss Geisel Award winner, There Is a Bird on Your Head.

Students then created their own “Elephant and Piggie” pages which we put into booklets to share with the school.  The books are on display outside the library.

All images : www.mowillemsstuff.blogspot.com

First grade students pondered this riddle when we read together, Laura Vaccaro Seeger’s book, First the Egg. 

The 2008 Caldecott Honor  and Theodore Seuss Geisel Honor book looks at process.  First one thing happens, then another happens.  Examples from the book are “First the egg, then the chicken.  First the seed, then the flower.  First the tadpole, then the frog.”After reading the book, students shared other examples about things change and are transformed.  They then wrote and illustrated additional pages in the “First, then” fashion.  Their colorful examples may be found on the bulletin board outside the library.

Image: www.ala.org

As a warm-up for our annual Story Tell-a-thon, students will often perform “Readers Theatre” in the library.  What is Readers Theatre?  It is the presentation of a short script, often adapted from a popular children’s book.  In library, we don’t use props, costumes or scenery.  Instead, students sit comfortably and use their voices to give meaning to the story.  They enjoy taking on different roles as they work on reading with fluency, volume and expression.  In addition to “performing” published scripts, this year our fourth grade students wrote their own original scripts based on traditional folktales and fables. 

First of all, students talked about traditional folk tales and shared with each other the special characteristics of fables.  We then read several fables and folk tales such as The Grasshopper and the Ant, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, and The Shoemaker and the Elves.   Then in small groups or as a whole class, students wrote original scripts retelling these traditional tales.

We are finishing up this this work now and the first group of original scripts may be read on our Reader2Reader wiki – a place for library work to be posted and shared.

After our spring break, students will be able to record their productions of their original scripts and these “podcasts” will also be posted on our wiki.

Today’s students need to know their way around a book and around the Internet.  Fifth grade students in classes 5J, 5R and 5U have been using our Reader2Reader blog in pairs and small groups of students for hands-on library learning.  They have been looking at Websites from the free Internet and Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia, a service our district subscribes to for student use.  Students are able to see that they have many options when they need information: books, encyclopedias and online resources that have been selected by teachers and librarians, as well as all of the results generated by a Google search.

Recently, students used an online thesaurus available through Grolier to find synonyms for the words in traditional nursery rhymes.  They have have been recording their updated classics and  posting them to our fifth grade wiki.  Click here: http://reader2reader.pbwiki.com/  to read and hear their work.

Recently, students in class 2I took a little trip all around New York City without ever leaving school!  How did they do it?  They used a little research, a little imagination and some Creative Commons licensed images!

Together, in library, we read Maira Kalman’s Next Stop, Grand Central.  Class 2I loves her quirky characters and zany illustrations.

We used the Super 3 research model (Plan, Do, Review) to discover three interesting facts visitors should know about New York City sights such as the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, the Bronx Botanical Gardens, Yankee Stadium, the World’s Fair Grounds, and many more. Students planned their research and then used nonfiction picture books, preselected Websites and paraphrases of encyclopedia articles. Each student selected three interesting facts to share in an oral presentation and prepared a PowerPoint slide with the name of the tourist spot and an image. Students used images that have Creative Commons licensing which allows their use in educational projects. Students copied and pasted the credits for the images on the PowerPoint slides as a way to give credit to, and thank, the photographers who share their work.
As they prepared to present their New York City sights to their classmates, students brainstormed guidelines for speaking and presenting to a group. When the big day came, each student showed his or her slide to the class and shared new knowledge about the sight. We videotaped the presentations so students were able to watch their own presentations and review their work.

Beginning in kindergarten, students learn that the library is organized so we can find the stories we want to read and the information we need to answer our questions.  Students begin identifying important features of books: title, author, illustrator.  They add to their vocabulary of “book words”: front cover, back cover, spine, publisher, call number and spine label.  They also begin to explore the ideas of fiction and nonfiction.  Students distinguish between stories that take place in an author’s imagination and books that give real, true information about a subject.

As our kindergarten students become more independent library patrons, they locate the picture book section, our collection of beginner chapter books, and nonfiction.  Just as we use bookmarks to hold our place in a book, the students use shelf markers to hold a book’s place on the shelf as they thumb through the pages to see if a particular book is of interest.  Kindergarten students take on greater responsibility as they choose their own books, check them out and return them to the library.

Favorite books of our kindergarten students are:

• Fancy Nancy  
• The Seals on the Bus
• Chicka Chicka Boom Boom
• The Mitten

Some of our favorite authors are: Leo Lionni, Eric Carle and Jan Brett.

So share a book with your favorite kindergarten reader today!

To bring their geography lessons to life, students in 3C and 3R used Google Earth.  Using the library SMARTboard, we traveled together around the world, identifying continents, oceans,mountains, and islands.  Students indentified compass directions when, for example, they described the Atlantic Ocean as being to the east of the United States or that Norway was to the northwest of Poland.

When students in class 1 Wa researched their families, they “booked a trip” via Google Earth to discover how far they, their parents, their grandparents or other ancestors traveled to the United States.  We began our trip at Central School and flew across the Atlantic to the British Isles.  We hopped all over Europe, touched down in Africa, Asia, Australia, Central America and South America.  Students were delighted to share their hertiage with their classmates and amazed at the distances we “traveled” that day.