Celebrate: A Student Who Loves Reading

The library received a gift yesterday. 

This stack of books was donated to the library collection as a gift from Adair, a fifth grader. It is a graduation gift (ours is a K-5 school). I am touched that Adair chose to spend money, she has earned or was given, on books for our school library. Additionally, she chose books that she knew her classmates loved and knew were rarely on the shelves.  I love that she was thinking about our library's readers and not about herself. I asked Adair to write about why she gave the books the library. Here is her message:

"I am Adair, a 5th grader. Recently I donated many books to the Mason-Rice School library. I did this for a variety of reasons. First of all, I love Mason-Rice and it’s library. I have a lot of good memories here, and this is where I got really interested in reading. I remember, this is the place where I first read Harry Potter. Also, since second grade, I had been saving up money to donate to Mason-Rice. Then, I realized that I could buy books for the library with my money and then donate the books to the school. So, I got a wide variety of books on Amazon (through the school) and gave them to the library. I have so many good memories here, by donating these books, I will be giving other people good memories of reading, this library, and this school."

Now, just a bit about Adair. She is a voracious reader. She has been from the beginning. When I ran circulation statistics from the past six years, Adair tops the list with 405 books. This statistic is only a portion of the books she reads. I know she borrows many books from the public library in our neighborhood and that her parents support her reading habits with a home library.  (I think my students overall would borrow more books from our school library, if I gave them more time for browsing and borrowing, but with thirty minute classes, I often short change them of this time, but this is a post discussion for another time.)  Today is about Adair and her wonderful and thoughtful gift to our school library. 

These books will make readers in our library very happy. I'll be writing a note to Adair. I am using this card set from Chronicle. It's a perfect choice, right?

There's not much more to say right now, except "Thank you, Adair. Thank you for helping grow and support readers at our school."

Haiku Poetry created with Storybird by Fifth Graders

The fifth graders will be writing Haiku poems about their school experiences for their graduation performance. As a way to scaffold this assignment, I worked with them to create Haiku poems. I reviewed the structure of a Haiku and then went over the assignment. The students had to create a Haiku with one of these themes: summer, reading, school, library, or books. The students used the template from ReadWriteThink. After creating a Haiku, the students could choose from one of four technology tools to present their poems. I had created examples for each form. They can be found on the assignment page.

Here is my poem created using Storybird.

Here are the students' Storybird poems.

Let's talk about A Snicker of Magic

I read A Snicker of Magic, by Natalie Lloyd, earlier this spring.  It's one of those books that I can't wait for my students to start reading so we can discuss it. It is now circulating and the conversations are beginning. Hooray! Here is one student's celebration of the book:

She created this Wordle:

She created this Animoto:

 

Haiku Poetry Created with ReadWriteThink by 5th Graders

The fifth graders will be writing Haiku poems about their school experiences for their graduation performance. As a way to scaffold this assignment, I worked with them to create Haiku poems. I reviewed the structure of a Haiku and then went over the assignment. The students had to create a Haiku with one of these themes: summer, reading, school, library, or books. The students used the template from ReadWriteThink. After creating a Haiku, the students could choose from one of four technology tools to present their poems. I had created examples for each form. They can be found on the assignment page.

Here are the student projects:

Haiku Poems Created with Animoto by 5th Graders

The fifth graders will be writing Haiku poems about their school experiences for their graduation performance. As a way to scaffold this assignment, I worked with them to create Haiku poems. I reviewed the structure of a Haiku and then went over the assignment. The students had to create a Haiku with one of these themes: summer, reading, school, library, or books. The students used the template from ReadWriteThink. After creating a Haiku, the students could choose from one of four technology tools to present their poems. Examples of the brainstorm sheets can be found at the bottom of the post.  

I created examples for each form. They can be found on the assignment page.

Here are the Haiku Poems expressed with Animoto.






















summer



Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life Haiku



SUMMER

More Civil Rights Movement Poetry from 4th Graders

The fourth graders have finished up their unit on the Civil Rights Movement. As part of the unit, the students used the Word Mover app from ReadWriteThink to create poems that would demonstrate their understanding of the subject. They used text from the I Have a Dream Speech. You can read more about the project here.  Quite a few of the student poems got lost in a separate folder.  I found them today, so here they are: