Club STREAM

Our Resource team is trying something new this year.  Since we have 4 resources (Art, Music, Library, P.E.), in the past our Fridays have been a class we saw earlier in the week, and trying to come up with a different activity for students to do.  This year, we are trying "Club Fridays."  Each nine weeks, students get to choose what club they'd like to join.  We gave a little presentation back on August 19 and had students choose:  Art/Gardening, Music & Movement, 100 Mile Club, or my club.  Unfortunately, my club has been called Makerspace, STEM, building club, and I had to stop the Art teacher from calling it Lego club at one point!  This past Friday was our first club day!

We have our small but growing Makerspace in our library, which the kids love, so it made since for my club to have something to do with it!  I thought about it this summer and finally came up with some cute ideas, thanks to Pinterest inspiration (pinspiration?).  I also decided to make it easy on myself:  group lessons by K/1, 2/3, and 4/5.  Well, for K/1 and 2/3, I'm focusing on stories and projects.  This past Friday, we read Mark Teague's version of the 3 Little Pigs, and students got to become pigs and build houses from each of the materials, then become the wolf and try to blow them down!  I differentiated between the two levels.  K/1 got all 3 materials and built in groups:  "sticks" (unsharpened pencils), "straw" (drinking straws), and "bricks" (connecting cubes).

2/3 had the same story, but different approach.  They had to choose a card from a bag to determine what type of house they would build - sticks (popsicle sticks), straw (drinking straws), or bricks (Legos).  I laid the materials out for students, as well as tape and string, and they had a certain amount of time to build.  Then, they too became wolves and got to blow their creations down!

I was a little nervous, thinking students might not want to hear a story and then do the activity, but they loved it!  Next Friday, we're doing Jack and the Beanstalk.  On a side note, when I asked students who had heard the story of the 3 little pigs, not everyone raised their hand!  Interesting.

For my 4/5 group, I was so excited to finally be using our Makedo tools we earned from Donors Choose last school year!  We are working together as a group to build a giant windball, so we can become familiar with the tools and working together.  This will last several Fridays.  In fact, we are still working on cutting out the cardboard squares!  Then, after that project is finished and we've played with it, we'll take it apart, and I'll show students the story of Cain's Arcade.  We'll then build our own arcade machines from recycled cardboard and other materials.

I'm really excited on how our clubs turned out this past week.  Each nine weeks, I plan on offering something a little different.  I just hope it's not one of those things that we do for one year, and it gets dropped!  The kids have really enjoyed having a choice and being able to mingle with other kids in their grade not in their class this year!  I've included some pics below on what we're doing, as well as a video of my 4th graders hard at work (and a preview of what our ball will hopefully look like!).  I can't seem to get the video to orient, so hopefully your neck doesn't get too stiff!

Caps and Patterns

I really wanted to post more than once a month, but that seems to be what my schedule is this year.  My apologies (and I won't even mention my Facebook page!  I told my husband he can take that over as much as he checks his!  Hah!).

Well, Book Fair is over for the Fall and I've had a day to recover!  Onward and forward, right?  This week, I don't get to see my kiddos because they're going to our new STEM Lab called the "Innovation Lab" and working on projects there.  So, 3 weeks out of the nine weeks, it happens, and it happens during Library Resource.  However, our TAG teacher who also runs the Innovation Lab does not need my help.  She does an awesome job with students and I feel like I sit there and babysit.  My first attempt at having a "flexible" schedule those weeks flopped.  No one signed up to come to the library.  Maybe it was the sample lesson plans I sent out?  I admit now, looking at them, they were a bit ambitious (having a "Mali Marketplace" for our 3rd graders, for example), but I was trying to get our teachers excited about using the library, me, the space, the resources.....and nada.  No one signed up.  However, this last time, I was talking to a Kindergarten teacher whose class had missed our Digital Citizenship lesson I co-taught with our ITRT.  We decided to make it up during this coming Innovation Week.

That's when it hit me!  Inviting teachers to sign up and basically hinting at an extra resource/planning time. I handle classes on a daily basis with no extra teacher (just like they do).  Also, my K and 1 teachers were saying how disappointed the kids were that they weren't in library and checking out books (not to mention a few parents complained!).  Bingo!  My K and 1 teachers are awesome and I have 6 out of the 11 (so far) signed up for this coming week and I'm teaching maps (pirate maps!) with first grade and math patterns with Kindergarten.  Both are concepts they've been working on in class, so it's not an introduction but rather an extension with a bonus of checking out books!  Win-win, right?

It also made me feel good that the teachers told me the kids missed coming to library and would be super excited about this coming week!

So, tomorrow starts my first K group so I've been working on what to do with patterns.  I'm using this nonfiction book to review patterns:

Then, I'm going to use the fantastic pictures in these books to have students point out patterns:

Finally, we're going to end with one of my dad's favorite read-alouds (the grandkids love his monkey impression!):


We have other pattern books in the library which are so fantastic - well, they're already checked out!  I immediately thought of Caps for Sale with patterns because a) I remember his caps having to be in a certain order and b) a sequel is coming out and is on preorder!!!  So exciting!

So, I spent this afternoon getting inspired and creative with caps and monkeys and came up with activities to use based on monkeys and caps!  I'm going to set up several stations for students to choose and complete:
a) using pattern blocks to create repeating patterns
b) sorting fall themed erasers and then creating patterns with them
c) color and cut out monkey patterns then gluing them to the vine page
d) create a pattern by coloring caps on a page

The last two can be found in my pack {here} at TPT or {here} at TN.  Stay tuned and I'll post the pirate map activities for the firsties this week!