The Battle of the Books program at Davis-Townsend elementary is very popular, so much so that the number of interested students far exceeds the available slots on the team. In order to include a greater number of enthusiastic readers, Heitman has designed an auxiliary book club that meets during lunch. 32 students were too many for a successful book club, so Heitman rallied interested staff members to divvy up the students into smaller groups. Heitman, her assistant, an EC teacher and a Title 1 reading specialist all meet with their respective groups on Wednesdays. Students attend with their dog-eared book in one hand and their lunch in the other. The small groups give students ample opportunity to dig deep into the books and engage in meaningful discussions. Heitman chose 5 titles from this year’s North Carolina Children’s Book Awards list. Each group reads and discusses the same book concurrently, and in the spring students will be able to vote for their favorite NCCBA title. Students can check out the books, but many parents opted to purchase a set for their child. The students’ energy is contagious and it doesn’t go unnoticed that the focus of the book club is on reading for the fun of it. If you are thinking about starting a book club in your school library, Heitman’s model could be easily adapted for any age group or book list.
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A special thanks to Rhonda Florence, media coordinator at Hasty Elementary, for this post on GAW.November 13-19, 2017, has been designated Geography Awareness Week by The National Geographic Society. Interestingly, the dates overlap with American Education Week. The week is a prime opportunity to emphasize geography with our students and their families.
So, what is geography? NGS explains it this way: “Geography is the study of places and the relationships between people and their environments. Geographers explore both the physical properties of Earth’s surface and the human societies spread across it. They also examine how human culture interacts with the natural environment and the way locations and places can have an impact on people. Geography seeks to understand where things are found, why they are there, and how they develop and change over time.” Geography and science go hand in hand. The same is true for geography and history, geography and nutrition, geography and agriculture. What region is your favorite coffee from (Sumatra, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic?) There is a reason why you like it, and it has to do with the geography of the area. Why does North Carolina have a thriving fishing industry while Kansas does not? (simple geography!) Why does burley tobacco get raised in Kentucky where it is cut on the stalk, speared and hung in the barn, to be stripped and tied after it cures? And why does North Carolina has an entirely different process? Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are important tools that can greatly improve geo-literacy. GIS brings to mind interconnectedness, and it can be used to solve many of the problems GeoWeek addresses. GIS Day is the Wednesday of Geography Awareness Week. For more information, go to GISday.org. For ideas for Geography Awareness Week, visit GeographyAwarenessWeek.org. Other ideas include:
The North Carolina Giant Traveling Map will be debuted at the Social Studies Conference in March. After that conference, guidelines for reserving and borrowing the map for your school/LEA will be discussed. #61: "Library in your Pocket" - EDHS uses QR codes to connect students to digital resources11/1/2016 This past year the EDHS Media Center has experienced an EXTREME makeover and with these changes, we decided one of our programming goals would be to focus on encouraging students to use the wonderful digital resources that are available to them for FREE! I have been following a few blogs this summer and while reading came across a post about “Library in Your Pocket.” The idea is that students have access to the Library and so many resources right at their fingertips, especially with devices that are carried in their pocket, their phones! The poster in the blog showed QR codes linking to various digital resources that the school had access to and I thought….well I can do that! So I made a quick list of the resources that I would want our students at EDHS to be able to access:
I wanted to focus on getting students to access resources that would assist them as they are working on assignments, research or just needed to have an update on what is happening at EDHS. Some of these links will lead them to other resources like our Media Center Page and our Research Resources S'more. This allowed us to have fewer links to work with as we were creating a poster. The next step is to create your QR Codes. You have a few options for this. You can use a QR Generator like www.qrstuff.com or you can use the Google Shortener (goo.gl). This is your personal preference. A Quick Side Note….if you want to see how many students are scanning the QR codes to document if the programming is successful and being used, you can take the URLs of the websites that you want to create the QR code for and use the Google Shortener (goo.gl) to get a link and a QR Code. This Shortener tracks the number of clicks/scans and will allow you to document how much the QR codes. There is a whole analytics section for each shortened URL. Last we designed our poster! I used Google Drawing to create the poster. These have been printed on our poster maker and will be placed in the EDHS Media Center and out as well as around the school building. We will also have smaller half page versions to hand out to students that come to the Media Center.
A special thanks to Shanna Leonard of Tyro Elementary for this fun book character contest idea. But, does this only have to apply to elementary or to a book fair? What are some ways that middle and high school could do something similar? In order to promote our upcoming Book Fair (November 14-18), our Media Center sponsored a Book Character Pumpkin Contest. This is our second year holding this competition and our student participation was amazing! We had 50 student pumpkins turned in. (Please see the Flipagram below with all the pumpkin book character entries). The students and staff were the judges this year. Every student and staff member in the school received 2 tickets. After choosing their top 2 favorite pumpkins, they placed a ticket in the cup beside their favorite pumpkin. Winners were chosen after counting the pumpkins tickets. The pumpkin from each grade level with the highest tickets received a $10.00 Book Fair gift certificate. We announced the winners over the intercom. The students were thrilled! This contest was a great way to promote the LOVE of reading and character awareness! |
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