Library Lady

Good morning! How was your week last week? With my kinders I took an easy week. We’ve had a lot of rain lately which is highly unusual for us, so they were quite wiggly. We started with some calisthenics and they settled down for the story. I read Library Mouse this week. For our activity after check out, they made Little Mouse books which I had downloaded from author Daniel Kirk’s web site. I had my aide cut the book ahead of time because I have learned from experience, that kinders are not capable of the cutting necessary for this project.

I read Library Mouse to my first graders as well. We discussed the difference between fiction and non fiction. They then completed a couple of worksheets from LiBEARy Skills K-3 in which they had to identify whether the pictures were fiction or non fiction.

In second grade, we continued working on shelf order. This week we advanced to the order of Non Fiction books. We discussed looking at the number line (top) of the spine label before looking at the letter line (bottom). I created a worksheet which is available in my Teachers Pay Teachers store. The worksheet has a series of “shelves” and then a list of “spine labels” to write out on the shelves. Since this was their first experience with placing non fiction spine labels in order, we did most of the work together.

My third graders got an introduction to our online catalog. I brought up the catalog on our big screen and explained the different parts of the entries and which information they would need to find the books. Up until third grade I don’t expect independent catalog use although I may teach this less to our current second graders as they are starting to want to look things up.

In fourth grade, we reviewed fiction vs. non fiction. I used and anchor chart from Teach With Me on “Fiction vs. Non Fiction.” For our activity, I created a worksheet of titles and they had to determine whether the title was a fiction or non fiction title. The worksheet will eventually be in my Teachers Pay Teachers store. 

With the fifth grade we introduced my favorite unit of the year – our Animoto unit. You can view my Animoto video describing the unit here.  For this first class I read some recent Caldecott winners and reviewed the criteria for the award. Then I showed them some trailers on You Tube which use Animoto – Lost and Found , Tacky the Penguin, and The Dancing Pancake.  Next week we will be looking at picture books published this year as they take the next step in their project. We will be using some of the books on this list.

This week also included the fifth grade’s final day in the library for the Bats project. The teacher had created an outline with the students prior to their visit. In this final visit they took their note cards and matched them to their outline points. The library is a great place for this activity – they can spread out on the floor or across our large tables. Now that they have started this step and know what to do, they will finish the organization and start writing their rough draft. They are so close, now, to being able to write a research paper on their own.

Teacher Pay Teacher – helps pay for this blog
Non Fiction Order

Amazon Affiliate Links – helps pay for this blog
Library Skills
Library Mouse

Other links from this post
Daniel Kirk’s web site
My Animoto Project description
Lost and Found
Tacky the Penguin
The Dancing Pancake
My list of potential Mock Caldecott Titles