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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.
In fourth and fifth grades, students enter our DISCOVERY research program. Co-taught by our technology teacher, Mrs. Forte, and myself, this program combines information literacy skills and technology skills and utilizes the resources of both the library and the computer lab. Students have a weekly, hour-long class with us for one half of the school year.
Mrs. Redito's and Mrs. Livingston's fifth graders are now immersed in an amazing election project, Meet the Candidates. This project asks students to take on the role of campaign managers for the two candidates. They are in the process of creating campaign commercials, podcasts, vodcasts, timelines and posters. By researching election resources provided in the project and by interpreting data from polls they are creating, students are using higher order thinking skills. Additionally, over 50 classes from around the country are participating in our project! We will videoconference with some of those classes in October. All classes will hold an election on October 30th and results will be posted on an online, interactive map.
Fourth graders have just earned their "Web Licenses." We have spent the month of September learning about Internet Safety as well as learning how to evaluate websites.
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