K1 Just Teddy - A Story of Friendship
I chose this book for K storytime as it shows how being different can sometimes make it hard to make friends, but that we should look for friends who accept us for who we are. The story of Just Teddy shows that if we try too hard to fit in, we can't be true to ourselves or find genuine friendship.
Image taken from https://mummumstheword.wordpress.com
This story is the work of a local Singaporean author, Emily Lim. This is her third book inspired by her experience of living with Spasmodic Dysphonia, a voice impairment that she has had for several years.
I read also read the book Making Manners Count: Playing Fair from Epic books. Afterwards we had a discussion about playing fair, not cheating and how we feel when others are being unfair during play time.
Image taken from https://www.getepic.com.
Y1 - Parts of a Book
Y1 are learning about the main parts of the book as part of their Reader Writer Workshop unit on personal narratives. During library class, we reviewed the parts and their role in a book, as well as introducing fiction and nonfiction to support their next unit on information books. As you can see, responses were slightly different in each class, but the general concepts were similar and understood.
Y1.3 Their responses to parts of a book.
Y1.1 Their responses to parts of the book.
Y1.2 Their responses to parts of the book.
Y2 How the World Works
The central idea of this unit of inquiry is how all living things go through a process of change in the natural world. To start this unit off, I focused on the parts of a plant. Most Y2s had covered this in Y1 so they had good prior knowledge and articulated well from the visual and verbal cues on the flipchart sheet. As a review, we watched the Brainpop Jr video on Parts of a Plant. Afterwards, we added to what we already put down.
Next week, we will add more information to this after we read Oh Say Can You Seed? from the Dr. Seuss Learning Library Series.
Image taken from Amazon.com
Y3 How We Express Ourselves
The central idea of this unit is that images communicate ideas and information. For this reason, I chose a book without words, Sidewalk Flowers, and had students tell me their interpretation of the story, one by one. As students gave their individual view of the story, their teacher transcribed their story as a class and I glued it in A3 with the book cover and some pictures from the book on a flipchart sheet.
Students later looked at how they could improve their writing in this story and the final version was attached to on a flipchart sheet with the book cover and central idea. See below for an example of this
Y4 How to find books in the Library
The Y4s had a review lesson on how to find books in the library both physically, on the shelves, and online, on our online school library catalog, Destiny. In their next unit of inquiry, students are looking how matter is transformed from one state to another for specific purposes. To connect this central idea to finding library books I asked them to come up with the keywords connected to this unit and they came up with chemistry, matter, reaction, physics. They guessed the right Dewey Decimal Subject (DDS) code for this. Can you?
After we noted down what students already remembered from Y3 on the DDS, we played them this video and they completed the library inquiry sheet below.
Y5 Where We Are in Place and Time
Y5s are investigating Greek myths as part of their central idea for their Where We Are in Place and Time. We looked at how we know about these myths today through books and oral history. The two popular book series, Percy Jackson and Goddess Girls came up in both classes.
Y6 How We Organize Ourselves
The central idea of this UOI focuses on how governance involves decision making that influences the rights and responsibilities of citizens. As this unit begins only this week and the US elections are next week, it was a timely opportunity to make the connection with the reality of US politics. To support this library inquiry, I also used a recently updated Brainpop video on US Presidential Elections with a focus on the two current presidential nominees.
