And I do research, too?

It's always hard to toot your own horn, but I can't help it for today was a pretty exciting day!  The extraordinary retired fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Harris, and I received an award from the New York State Archives.  Wild!  For three years Karen and I worked hard introducing kids to primary documents, our community, repositories and local historians in order to create a research project to submit to the NYS Student Research Award.  Kids researched what Castleton was like in its heydey!  They interviewed senior citizens, visited cemeteries and old movie theatres.  They admired wedding rings purchased from a jewelry store in our town and visited what was once an old jail.  Train wrecks, yearbooks, fire escapes, bakeries, newsrooms, wedding albums...And although the kids never won the top prize, in our minds they did. Yes, I cried when they didn't win, but I had to remind myself what hard work they put in and how much they learned about archives, historical records, primary documents and more.

Two years ago, we read the book Revolution by Deborah Wiles aloud with all of the fifth graders. Then we examined segregation and discrimination as the focus of our research projects. Some of the topics students examined were music, Title IX and literature. As a prerequisite to the research, Kathy Sheehan, the Rensselaer County historian took us on a field trip of Troy and we performed a reader's theatre.  Check this out:

Kathy Sheehan with our late superintendent, Bob Horan.
He met us in Troy that day.

Look at Bob participating in the Reader's Theatre!

Karen and I even took our show on the road!  We presented our program at four state conferences (one we even did twice because the workshop in our room was cancelled and people were anxious to learn something) and last year I wrote about it in my column for School Library Connection.

We couldn't have done it without the support of our administration and the perseverance of the village, town and county historians.  We were lucky enough to see the town and county historians today.  We reminisced about the time we had a 6:30 AM meeting with Kathy Sheehan to plan our project.  I did bring muffins to ease the pain of a sunrise meeting. But boy is that dedication or what?!

What an honor today was!  Thank you again NYS Archives for this award.  Thank you, Karen, for a seamless collaboration.  And of course, thank you to all of our students who worked so hard through and through even pulling their hair out to get the final submissions done as late as the 11th hour (literally!) on the very last day of school!

A Blast from Our Past

This documentary won an honorable mention in 2013.  It is from our very first year and is about a hotel that used to be right on Main Street in Castleton.  It's actually quite interesting.  They were lucky enough to get their hands on many primary documents and artifacts.  I was with the kids the day they were in the Village Hall and the ledger of the hotel was discovered in the back room. Needless to say, I was leaping!

American House VIDEO

For the love of audio books

I wanted to write a post about my favorite audio books.  You know, the ones that stick with you way after you have listened to them.  The ones that you can still remember exactly what you were doing while you were listening.  When you pull into the driveway and can't turn it off.  Or you take the long way home just so you can keep listening. Those ones.

First, Rules by Cynthia Lord.  I remember my kitchen floor was never that clean before I had the CD rolling and has never been that clean since. This was back before we redid our kitchen when we had one of those hangover CD players under our cabinets.  It was many years ago but I still remember hugging the mop with tears streaming down my face.  I hated when that book ended.*

And then there was An Abundance of Katherines.  I was taking a YA literature course and just getting introduced to John Green.  This was way before TFIOS.  That time my driveway never got shoveled as perfectly as it did that afternoon.  I was grateful for the snowstorm, plugged in my iPod (before iPhones) and happily shoveled the driveway.

I cannot forget Revolution by Deborah Wiles.  Hours and hours but worth every second.  This is a performance and reading all wrapped together. Listen to the Beatles.  Imagine the poems.  The actors bring 1964 to life through the fiction and nonfiction text.  I found myself driving extra slow so my time for turning off the audio would be lengthened.

Do you like spooky?  Try listening to The Thickety by JA White, especially on a long and winding DARK road.  And then plan to have a deer run in front of your car.  My heart was pounding.  Read by a woman with an Irish accent, this fantasy story feels even more real than ever.

My newest addition to the list is Echo by Pam Munoz Ryan.  You can read my review of the book in my previous post.  The audio is just perfect.  With all the musical references, the book was meant to be an audio book.  From Brahams Lullaby, to Tchaikovsky, to Rodgers and Hammerstein, it is completely lovely and soothing.

And of course, there is Harry Potter.  Every. Single. One.  Don't tell him, but I have a huge crush on Jim Dale.  How many different voices has he had to do for all seven books?  I could listen to him read for days on end.

*I just saw that Jessica Almasy, the reader of Rules, also is the reader for Under the Egg, by Laura Marx Fitzgerald.  I loved that book.  Now I need to listen to the audio!

Newsworthy

Today Casey Seiler, from the Times Union came and spoke to our fifth graders about writing newspaper articles. WOW!  I could have listened to him speak forever!  If I was a fifth grader with no knowledge of what I wanted to be when I grew up, he actually might have turned me on to being a reporter.  Really.  He was that inspiring and so good with the kids.

We invited him in to give our students a little idea of how to write a newspaper article.  They will all be writing articles for our edition of The Castletonian.  He gave them some great ideas and had some really meaningful quotes, such as:

"All the things that make a good piece of journalism, make a good piece of fiction."

"Competition makes you better."

And I forget the exact question Casey was answering but his answer was profound:

"I don't feel like I understand something till I've written about it."  That makes a lot of sense!  I think I'm seeing that with this blog, even in its infant stages.

Thank you so much, Casey, for coming in and speaking to our fifth graders. We hope you will return!

5th graders just had awesome chat w @CaseySeiler Ready to start our #Revolution inspired newspapers @deborahwiles pic.twitter.com/soXMQcG2PH

— Ms.Rattner (@C_ESLibrary) May 26, 2015