Crescent Elementary

We have been reading the book “The Magic Thief” by Sara Prineas to several of our upper grades. They are really enjoying this book. We have done a few short book talks with them to introduce them to other books similar in content like, “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” and “Fablehaven”.

With our younger grades we have been reading books about all things winter. (winter sports, winter animals, winter fun etc.) First grade did a wall art display for our library about perky penguins so we brought out all our Tacky the penguin books and read those to first grade. They were disappointed when we had no more Tacky books to read.

Sprucewood Elementary

Mary Had a Little Lamp

This month we shared, “Mary Had a Little Lamp” with our students.  This is one of the Beehive nominated books.  We did a comparison between this book and the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb”.  The students loved the book.  It was fun to see them compare the two stories.  The students  also pointed out other books that were similar like “Good Night Moon” and “Goodnight Goon”.

 

From Susan

Percy Jackson and the Olympians is coming out as a movie shortly!  It is rated PG.  It looks wonderful.  Watch this trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zut7VEdXdmw

Draper

Here is a fun Book and Activity to do for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. go to http://www.storylineonline.net/  pick White Socks Only . Actress Amber Rose Tamblyn will read the book. Here are some activity you car do with it.

LONE PEAK ELEMENTARY

We had fun in December with the new Christmas books, and one week I read the pop-up book "The 12 days of Christmas" by Robert Sabuda. I had the students sing the song, but they could not get past  the fifth day without help (I'm glad I had the book in front of me). The 3rd and 4th grades all wanted to do it again. I also showed them other books with the song in, and we did a comparison, the pop-up was the most requested although I had to tell them it was just a teacher's book. l plan on showing the "America the Beautiful" book later in the year. Angela

Crescent Elementary

 We have a small pre-lit Christmas tree that we use as part of our holiday decorations in the media center. We  have made ornaments to go on that tree that tie in with the library. We took several old catalogs that are sent to our school, the ones that are used for ordering books. We cut out the small pictures that show the cover of the books, mounted those pictures on small pieces of styrofoam cut the size of those pictures, then trimmed the edges of the styrofoam with red ribbon trim. We used small paper clips to shape an ornament hook, poked that into the styrofoam and placed the ornaments on the tree. The children loved looking at them and many of them asked where they could find that book in our library.  

DraperElementary

Title: Santasaurus
grades: all
The students enjoyed this fun book about Christmas with dinosaurs.
Title : Polar Express
grades: all
We did this Christmas favorite as a book on tape. It was fun and the students enjoyed it  alot.
Title: A creature was Stirring
grade: all
This story was very fun. It was the story of the night before Christmas and all so a little boys events that happened on the night before
Christmas.
We also did some lessons.

We talked about the Arctic and Antarctica and did a slide show. The students enjoyed this a lot

Sprucewood

Title:  Pizza, Pigs & Poetry 

Author:  Jack Prelutsky

Grade:   4-6

During December we shared this book by Jack Prelutsky, which is also one of the Utah Beehive Nominees.  Jack Prelutsky shares many ideas on how to write poetry, including some of his own childhood experiences from which he gleaned ideas for his poems.  He offers tips, advice and secrets about writing and provides some fun exercises to help you get started on a poem.  The kids loved hearing the stories that his poems were based on.  If you are a poet, want to become a poet or just want to try to write a poem, you need to read this book. 

Altara's December Blog

Title: "Snowflake Bentley" By Jacqueline Briggs Martin

3-6th grades

This is a fascinating book about the life of one of the first men to photograph snowflakes. It received the Caldecott Medal in 1999. The pictures are wonderful. We paired it with "Snow Crystals", which is the photography book that has William Bentley's work in it. It's fun to look at these old photos of thousands of snowflakes. After reading the book we had paper and scissors out for those students who wanted to cut out a snowflake, which we now have hanging from our ceiling in the media center.

Title: "The Twelve Days of Christmas" By Hillary Knight

1-6th grades (We were just going to do this with the younger grades but decided to include the older grades as well)

This is just the traditional poem/song of the Twelve days of Christmas. While we read the book to the classes we had twelve students standing up in front with a sign that read "A Partridge in a pear tree", "two turtle doves, "three french hens, etc. While we read the book each of the students with the signs on had to do an action that went along with their sign. Partridge in a pear tree had to stand with their arms in a circle above their heads and had to say "Cheep" in a high voice when we read their part. After we read the book we had the whole class stand and sing the last verse with everyone doing all of the actions together. This was a blast, the students loved it.

***We loved the idea of Halloween jokes that one of the other schools did. We don't have any wall space in out media center so we typed up Christmas jokes and taped 3-4 of them on each of our tables.

Altara

I've seen jokes posted in the library, but Altara posted Christmas jokes on the tables in the library.  My personal favorite was: "What do you call Santa's anual barn dance?  A Ho, Ho, Ho Down!

~Susan Huff