Alta View Elementary

Halloween
By Jerry Seinfeld
The book Halloween by Jerry Seinfeld has become a tradition at Alta View. The students love listening to the CD of Jerry Seinfeld's vision of Halloween.
The kids can identify with his rules of Halloween from what makes a good costume to what is acceptable trick or treat candy. We let them listen to the Cd of the book, because we couldn't read the book quite like Jerry Seinfeld.

Draper Elementary

Draper Elementary Library's theme this year is "Where in the World Can You Find..." We have interesting displays set up from all over the world! We have contests and games going where we show the kids a picture of something famous in the world and they have to guess where it is. A big map on the wall helps us track our discoveries like the Big Wall of China and Big Ben. Kids gather around the map and chatter about the world!

Willow Springs Elementary

Title: There was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bat!
Author: Lucille Colandro
Illustrated: Jared Lee
We used this book in two different way depending on the grade level. For the first grade we made a large cutout of the old lady and of the various things she swallowed. As we read the story we dropped the different objects in her "tummy". For grades 2 and 3rd, we had a script of the different pages and gave them out to the students. Two or three students had the same script which was numbered. When a number was held up, the students with that text read their part. This was like a choral reading of the book.

I'll take a picture of her cutout and send it to you.  It is SO cute! SH

lone peak (Angela)

In grades K-4 I have been reading the book Mrs. McMurphy's pumpkin by Rick Walton and The Very Hairy Scary story by the same author. I told the student that he is an Utah Author, and lives in Provo, I pulled several of his books and had them available for them to look at.

It's so fun to listen to Angela read with her very British accent!  SH

Sunrise Elementary

Title: Bugs
Author: David T. Greenberg
Illustrated by: Lynn Munsinger
This year our theme for the Library is Bugs and Bee's so we read this book to kick it off.
This book is about insects written in Poetic Form. It explores the different things that can be done to bugs.
Bugs can be cooked, trained, grounded up and eaten. Then the author exchanges perspective and suggest what bugs might do to us.
We talked about what bugs the kids liked and don't like. The kids really enjoyed this book and laughed a lot.
We are giving out Bee bucks this year for kids that are using great library manners and helping in the library to keep the shelves neat and cleaning up. We put the "Bee Bucks" in bug catchers we got for each of the grades and will draw out 2 from each class at the end of the month.

Altara

"What Happened to Marion's Book" by Brook Berg
This is a clever story about a young hedgehog, who is not very careful with her books. She winds up destroying a book that she has checked out from the library. We then find out what she has to do to remedy the problem.
After we read the book, we had a student come up front and put on a doctors white coat, a stethoscope and a pair of glasses. We then asked the students "What do doctors do for us?" (They help us take good care of our bodies.) We then told them that we wanted them to all be "Book Doctors" this year and help us take good care of our books. We then showed a beat up discarded book and we labeled it with several diseases. ---Chronic Crayon Scribble-itis, ---Acute water wave inflammation, ---Perforated Pet Puncture Wound, ---Sticky bubble Gum Adhesion, --- Chronic Slimy Ketchup Splatter, ---Lacerated Tear of the Final Page. We would turn to the diseased pages and then ask the students what we could all do to help prevent these awful book diseases. The students loved the doctors costume and it was fun to hear what they would do to take care of their books.
We did this with Kindergarten through 3rd grade.

Willow Springs Elementary

For Halloween, we have put cutout paper pumpkins around the library. On the outside of the pumpkin is a riddle. On the inside is the answer to the riddle. The kids love looking at them as they look for books. We just used die cuts to cut the pumpkins then we taped 2 of them together on the stem so they would open! Happy Halloween from Willow Springs! (This blog was written by Susan Huff)

Sprucewood

We recently shared parts of a couple of our new books with the kids. The first one we shared was:
Title: "Tiger Shark"
Author: Deborah Nuzzolo
This book introduces the kids to tiger sharks and describes their physical characteristics and behavior. The kids figured out quickly why they are called Tiger Sharks (striped liked tiger). They thought it was interesting that the adult sharks eventually lose most of their stripes.

Title: "The Naked Mole-Rat"
Author: Jody Sullivan Rake
This is a book from the Series "Weird Animals". The kids loved the pictures of the naked mole-rat. It is such an ugly creature that some thought it was actually cute. The book describes their unique home, body, behavior and how they survive in the animal world. Naked mole-rats are mostly hairless and have sharp ugly teeth. The kids were "freaked out" that snakes like to eat naked mole-rats.
We shared these books with grades 3 & 4.

 If your kids were old enough, you could also suggest a great fiction book called The Naked Mole-Rat Letters by Mary Amato~SHuff

Oak Hollow

In September we welcomed the classes to "A World of Reading" .

We used the following books:

World Atlas for Young Explorers   912 NAT

People by P. Spier               155.2 SPI

Chronicle of the Olympics 796.48 CHR

How I learned Geography by Uri Shulevitz         E SHU

We introduced this as our Theme for the library this year.  Our book talks this year will challenge students to explore the world through books.  The map of the world shows us many countries and there are many people with different languages, foods and cultures to learn about.  We talked about the Olympics and how countries parade their flag during the opening ceremonies.  We had a flag displayed that older grades had fun trying to identify the country it represented. (Hungary). An especially relevant picture book is by Uri Shulevitz called How I learned Geography.  I showed only a couple pages from this book and told how this small boy was able to dream about the world and explore places simply by studying a large, colorful map of the world that his father brought into his home when he was a small child.  I point out that the book is autobiographical – about the life of the author/illustrator. We find the places on the map where this author was born (Poland) and lived in poverty during the war (Kazakhstan) and lives today (NewYork City).

Welcome Back!

How about starting of the school year with First Day Jitters?