Lone Peak Elementary Angela Helsby

Hi, Because the Winter Olympics are on at the moment, this week we highlighted books on the Olympics and past and present medal winner, such as Michele Kwan & Tara Lipinski, also some of the sports, "A is for Axel" is a great book. The boys loved the books on snowboarding and ice hockey. As many of the students don't remember the Salt Lake Winter Olympics of 2002 I showed them some of the pictures out of the book on this.

For fiction books I picked "Snow" by Uri Shulevitz, this was a Caldecott honor book, and I really love the funny illustrations. (This will be my first time trying to add a picture , I just hope it works.) I showed them at the end Humpty Dumpty and Mother goose. Although not a fiction book I highlighted "Snow is falling" by Franklyn M. Branley.

I really look forward to reading some of your bogs, I think I am in the Winter doldrums, and with all these short weeks I am having a hard time coming up with new ideas.

Crescent Elementary

We have been reading the book “The Magic Thief” (Beehive Nominee) to grades 3-6 for a couple of months now and the students are really enjoying it. It is about a boy named Conn who is a street urchin and pickpockets to provide a living for himself. He pickpockets a wizards locus magicalicus stone and doesn’t die. (which should happen to anyone who is not a wizard). The wizard, whose name is Nevery, is astonished and intrigued. He agrees to take Conn on as his apprentice on the condition that the boy finds his own stone within a month. A locus stone is used to focus magic and work spells, every wizard has his own stone that works only for him and each stone looks different. Will Conn find his stone in time and how will he know it is his?

We are about two chapter from finding out how the where Conn will find his stone.

I gave each student a sheet of paper with two questions on it.

1.       How and where do you think Conn will find his locus stone?

2.       What do you think his locus stone will look like?

I gave those students who wanted to share their ideas, time to read them before we discover the real answers.

Crescent Elementary

Charlene Farr

 

Sunrise Elementary

Title: The night I followed my dog
Author: Nina Laden
This was a fun book to read and the older classes really enjoyed it, especially 5th & 6th.
It is about what a dog does during the night when you think he is in his doghouse ( which doesn't look like anything you built) sleeping.
The way the book is written with different fonts and pictures for words makes it fun to read.

Title: The Sandman
Author: Ralph Fletcher
The Sandman is a story about a little man who discovers Dragon Scale dust can put people to sleep.
So he searches each night to find boys and girls who have a hard time falling asleep and sprinkles
dragon dust in there eyes. It was really a cute story.

Incentives:
Are you having problems in your library with noise control, sloppy shelves, shelf markers not being put away, running etc.
Try an incentive program in your library.
For example this year we decided to decorate our library with Bugs and Bees. Our incentive goes along with it.
When each class comes to the library 2 kids can earn bee bucks. Either the teacher or the librarian looks for kids that are using really good library manners.
Finding a book, sitting at the tables reading quietly, helping push in chairs etc. At the end of library time we tell the class who earned the bee bucks and we have them come up and put them in the little bug catcher we have for each grade. At the end of the month we draw out 2 names for each grade and they come down and choose a book (we recieved through the bookfair) and a small treat. If the class is really noisy and out of control in the library we don't give any to that class. It really works to keep your library under control and it puts the kids in charge of keeping their library nice and neat. They work hard for them and always ask "who got the bee bucks". The teachers seem to enjoy it also because it helps them keep control of their class.

Alta View Elementary

The Winter Olympics are February 12^th –February 28^th.

We decided to do a Reading Olympics starting next week.  We are going to let the students give  a “medal” to the books they read during the month of February.

The Students will choose a medal for the book and write the name of the book on the medal. We have bronze(brown), silver(gray) and gold (yellow)  die cut circles.   Then we will put the medals up on our bulletin board throughout the month. 

We will put an update on the blog at the end of the month and let you know how the students liked this activity.

Altara

Title: "The End" by David LaRochelle

This is a fun Beehive book. It starts at "THE END", with the courtship and marriage of the handsome knight and a clever beautiful princess, and follows the story backwards through a cowardly dragon afraid of bunny rabbits, a large tomato, and a giant that throws tantrums.

We read this book front to back at first, and then had the students help us tell the story the normal way by starting at the back of the book reading forward. The students loved trying to come up with what part of the story was next.

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