Week 16: Puzzled in the Library!

Hope you enjoyed the virtual ISGR Easter Egg Hunt in the last post! And we hope you had a restful Easter Break too.

This week in the library, we will be doing this quiz: Week 16_ Library Quiz. You can do it at home as well, if you’d like!

We are hoping to have lots of time for the Read Alouds during library time this week. If you can’t be at school, we’ve uploaded the audio files of the planned story times below. You are very welcome to choose your own reading for story time/read alouds when you are at home.

STORY TIME:

PYP K – 1: The Monkey Puzzle by Julia Donaldson. Want to hear it sung to you? Click here!

PYP 2: A Boy Called Bat by Elena K. Arnold

PYP 3: Coraline by Neil Gaiman

PYP 4: The Loser’s Club by Andrew Clements

PYP 5: Restart by Gordon Korman

SPARK:

Choose one moment in the story where one of the characters does something you fully disagree with. Why do you disagree with that decision, choice or action? If you were the writer of this story, would you change that moment in the story? Why (not)? How does that serve the story?

DO: (This will be the Library Challenge of the Week; LEGO pieces will be available in the library!).

Take four bricks of LEGO (see photo on the left). In how many different Lego Brick ways can you put it together?

How is this connected to reading, you may wonder. Because reading is a puzzle. I’m not only talking about decoding the symbols on the paper, but also puzzling out the story. Each story (or most of them anyways) have similar elements (lego bricks): characters, plot, setting, tone, point of view – just to name a few. All these different elements can be put together in many (many!) different ways to make a variety of different stories. You can also think within genres, for example a detective novel. Each story has similar structural elements that the reader helps understand the story. It’s the skeleton of the story (don’t mind the pun), but the flesh on the bones is different for every single detective story. If that makes sense.

So much brain power goes into reading: decoding, comprehending, interpretation, connecting, predicting, deducting, judging, etc. And so it goes for figuring out in how many ways you can put four LEGO bricks together. And no, you’re not allowed to google it.

REASONS TO READ:

“A reader will often express dislike for elements of the story that have puzzled him – things he has found difficult to understand. ‘What did it mean when…’ he’ll say, or: ‘Did you understand the where…’ … The friends discuss the puzzle and the suggested explanation, and out of this comes an understanding of (or an agreement to disagree on) what the text is ‘about’ – what it ‘means’ – to that group of readers at that time.”