Our Library Time
Last week’s library game was a success! Arjun (in second grade) said, while we were playing the game, “I think this game teaches us about our library!”. And that’s exactly what it did. Students had to find books from the different sections of the library, they had to show what quiet reading looks like, or had to answer a question about their reading habits and preferences. We played and learned together!
Here are a few photos taken during the game with a second grade. Notice how we’re getting closer to the board as we play the game! It was very exciting!
Here are photos of the end result of several of the games we played:
After the exciting energy of the game, students checked out their books and did some quiet reading.
With the Foundation classes we finished reading Library Lion and worked on understanding what fiction books are and what non-fiction books are. We will do this again next week, in the form of a sorting game. We will be connecting different words for the same category (made-up stories or stories from the writer’s imagination, for example, for fiction), as well as placing books in the correct category (fiction or non-fiction). We’ll be reading (parts of) Do You Know Dewey? by Brian P. Cleary to give the students an idea of what kind of topics they can find in our non-fiction section.
Next week, in PYP 1 – 5, we will be working on our Library Learning Goals (as part of the First Six Weeks of School, matching the Responsive Classroom approach). These learning goals, together with how we want our library to sound like, look like and feel like, will inform our library agreements. We would like to build and maintain a library learning environment in which all students can work on (and reach) their library learning goal. But in order to do that, we first need to think about, draft, fine-tune, and then commit to our goals (or Hopes and Dreams as they were previously called)! Next week, we focus on writing a draft of our Library Learning Goal. The week after, we will fine-tune and finalize them.
Perhaps you are familiar with the poem Magic Carpet by Shel Silverstein? I’ve used it in lessons and workshops before: it’s simple and very inspiring.
I’ve re-written this poem a bit, so I can use it to introduce the idea of creating Library Learning Goals:
Magic Library
You have a magic library
That you will visit every week.
You can find fiction, facts, even manga,
Whatever it is you seek.
So will you make your library time
As magical as it can be,
Or will you wander off
And miss this
Fantastic
Opportunity?
We can connect our Library Learning Goal to the IB Learner Profile Attitudes and to the ATL-skills (Approaches To Learning). We will end our brainstorming session with this poem, also by Shel Silverstein:
Resources
We would like to share with you our latest, newest non-fiction titles:
The new Storytime is here! Ready to be checked out from our school library, but is also accessible as a pdf, including the activity pack.
I would also like to draw your attention to the fact that it is WordKidLit Month, “reading the world through kids’ books in translation”. Follow the WorldKidLit blog here!
Your Read Aloud Language
As you maybe know, I write a monthly guest blog for the Dutch sister of Storytime (called ERWASEENS). For this month’s blog, I will be writing about raising children in a multilingual environment, focusing on reading aloud. I was hoping you’d be willing to share some of your read aloud experiences with me which I can include in my guest blog by filling out this form. Totally voluntary, of course. Thank you!
Thank you for reading our library blog and staying up to date with our library learning!
Happy Reading,
Fleur
ISGRGuldLibrary 