Piggie and Elephant Dance Party

This was actually so easy it's kind of embarrassing that I am even posting it. Kids LOVED the P&E dance game on Pigeon Presents. So as an end of the year treat? We made Piggies and Geralds, spread out, and DANCED. The original thought had been to get everyone in within a couple days of each other and get helium balloons but that didn't happen. Oh well. These pictures are rubbish but hello. Try to catch 4 year olds dancing with a phone camera. This is what you get. ;]

Paper plates from (gasp ... not a fan) WalMart. Eyes cut out with diecuts. Ears and noses cut out several at a time in between classes. Glue sticks ... how do they still manage to make messes with glue sticks? But you can bet they know Piggie and Elephant were written by Mo (three fingers down) Willems (three fingers up).






Hooray PicMonkey! Collage is here! Catch you later.

Oops. Been almost a month.

Hmmm. I will put off some blame with "I had lots and lots of family in town for about two weeks." Of course, some bloggers are super organized and schedule posts ahead of time for things like that. So not all the blame can be passed along. ;]

Two more days of school! Then several more days of cleaning up, decluttering, writing reports (BLAH! a necessary evil), tech camp (which reminds me, I need to go back and look at the photo editing page and make sure it is up to date and then republish it!) and summer break really will begin.

Super excited for #bookaday. Brought home a stack of books from school. Still have a stack from the public library. Still have some on my shelves I haven't read yet (I am not the only person who does that, right? Buys books and then even though I really do want to read them they keep getting put off because the library ones have to be returned?). And still have several on my Nook ... some purchased and some from Netgalley that I hope haven't already expired!

Have to go with an easier post today ... a roundup of some library/book related pins I've happened upon the last couple of weeks. Will be back soon with some of the other projects for the summer. As well as a real What I've Been Reading post.





A Scaredy Squirrel inspired bag. I want. Even if in this pic it is modeled by a little boy. There's a whole series on this blog about projects inspired from kids' books.






We got an iPad for the library! One iPad. Which is better than no iPad. And a bit of $$$ to get some apps. So ... playtime this summer with planning!

Source: evernote.com via Angie on Pinterest

Goal this summer? Learn to properly use Evernote. Had an account for a couple years but I hardly ever use it and can't get rid of the feeling I'm missing out.




How crazy would it be to try to do these with kids in the fall? Not all of them. But maybe the ones who finished one of the summer reading challenges or something?

Questions and Answers

So this week has been mostly about research. A lot about research, actually, which is super cool. I like that.


Third grade is going to do a "virtual" wax museum this time around--instead of the CROWDED MADHOUSE that is the live, in person one. Film an interview between the famous person and a newscaster. We're also tying the research in to Covey's Seven Habits of Leaders ... how did this person show that they could be proactive, or that they sought to understand others, or put first things first. Been doing ... authors and illustrators, scientists and inventors, and explorers. Should be fun.

Fourth grade is actually doing something fairly similar but with famous Texans. Though their final product is a bit more open ended ... powerpoint, letter, radio podcast, etc.

Find the pic here. Posted with CC license by BrainPopUK.

Here's my conundrum.

I feel like we did not spend enough time on questioning (Well, and this is a recurring problem ... can't learn all of these skills in one sitting, right?) and relevant details. They were doing great on their research and pretty much keeping on task ... but a lot of them were really getting bogged down in relatively unimportant minutiae. Can I tell you how many times I answered the question "What does elope mean?" from 4th grade this week. Can't remember who they were studying, but still.


And again, this is just as much my fault as the teachers, but they kept walking through "if you don't do the citations that's 20 points off." YES. Citations are important. YES. It seems like the kids ignore them unless you threaten with grades. I just would have liked to have heard more thought going in to what they were writing down.


Had a class have to come down and tell me how excited they were to have finished Wonder. I wish I would have taken a picture ... they were all standing there with the books in their hands smiling. Teacher told me about a comment ... "We used to be such baby readers." I am super excited ... they are all going to write their own precepts and we'll make a trailer for the book out of that. So I'm not totally incapable, right? Plus the PreK teacher had to come down and tell me about a kid who, when asked what he wanted to be when he got older, said he wanted to work in the library like Ms. O. So I'm not totally inept. Just have to keep thinking about how to tweak my explanations better and get more practice with the kiddos on questioning in research.