October Happenings

The month of October was a busy one in the library! The primary grades listened to some spooky Halloween stories, such as The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything and Skeleton Hiccups and practiced sequencing skills on the smartboard. In second grade we concentrated on parts of the book and arrangement of books on the shelf using online games and quizzes. Third graders began their preliminary "flight training" as they learned to navigate the Dewey Decimal System.

In our Research Classes, Mrs. Benzoni's and Mrs. Taliercio's classes are participating in our Research WebQuest. This very important unit teaches students:

• How to find the resources they need, both in the library and online
• How to safely navigate the web
• How to recognize reliable resources on the web
• How to research using the Big6 research process
  
• How to skim and scan information
  
• How to take notes
• What plagiarism is
• How to create citations using our subscription to NoodleTools

Our two fifth grade classes (Mrs. Redito's class and Mrs. Livingston's class) completed our Meet the Candidates research project. They were amazing!! We held an election rally on October 30th, where students presented their final products, including political newscast videos and public service announcement videos. Students also created posters, buttons, and flyers. We even skyped (videoconferenced) with a fifth grade class from Delaware to debate some hot political issues. There was quite a bit of excitement when Barack Obama and John McCain showed up at our rally! After the rally, all of fifth grade went to the computer lab to vote on our online poll. Like the real vote, Barack Obama was our winner, with 65% of the votes. Because other schools participated in our project, we were also able to see how classes across the country voted on our CommunityWalk map. Students are now blogging about the experience. In all, this project made great use of technology and web 2.0 tools to bring the curriculum alive.