BORN TO FLY

We don't wait very long to celebrate here at Castleton Elementary School.
14 days into the new school year and we had our first author visit on his book birthday.
Welcome back to CES, Steve Sheinkin!



Since the first day of school, we have been preparing for Steve's visit.  Between our "Born to Fly" Selfie Scavenger Hunt with Grades 4-6 to sharing and reading books from the Time Twisters series to "building" paper airplanes to writing and illustrating a Steve Sheinkin A-Z book to daily announcements, we were ready to take off when he arrived!





The visit flew by (yes, all puns intended). Steve signed books, entered the gym on our red carpet, shared stories and then enjoyed some pie and ice cream with my 6th grade Dewey Duty kids. And even though the visit is behind us now that doesn't mean we are going to stop reading Born to Fly. I'll see you at 2, Mr. Morse's class.

The rock star enters our Old Gym

We heard that Steve loves pie and cherry vanilla ice cream so that's what we had at our party.  Then the kids (thank you, Mrs. Warland for the awesome idea) wrote down ideas for names of pie that ties in airplanes, flying or pilots. Some of our favorites:

Pilot's Pie

Airpple Pie

Women's Air Derby Pumpkin Pie

Flypple Pie

Amelia's Apple Pie

Propeller Pie

 Airplane Pielots

 

Thanks Mrs. Fowler (7th Grade English) and Mrs. Squier (JR/SR HS Librarian) for stopping by!

You can't leave Castleton before you leap

PS: Want to know more about Steve's life? Check out this book we made in third grade:

 

At the Mountain's Base

The beauty of a completely flexible schedule is that you can be, well, flexible.

This morning I received an urgent email from a first great teacher with the subject line, "HELP!"
She thought today was the day we were celebrating a big book birthday. Parents sent in homemade cookies, grapes and other snacks for the party.  But, our planned party is actually next week.  What to do?  "Can you come down at any time today to celebrate something?" 12:45 it was.

Fortunately, it didn't take me long to look through my F&Gs to find a book that celebrated its birthday yesterday. The gorgeous, poetic and thought-provoking-for-any-grade, At the Mountain's Base it was. And celebrate we did. Happy belated, Traci Sorell and Weshoyot Alvitre.  And check out the book's well deserved STARRED REVIEW from SLJ.

We read the book and talked about peace, family and Native Americans.  We sang "This Land is Your Land" (they knew the lyrics way better than I did!).  I brought down some yarn since it is "weaved" throughout the story and we glued a piece onto card stock in the shape of a square or circle.  Tomorrow they will draw their families inside the yarn frame.

"Don't forget we have to sing 'Happy Birthday!'" many of them reminded me.  Of course!

I love my job. And I especially love that my schedule allows me to squeeze in a book birthday at the last minute in between meeting first graders to critique Geisel contenders, helping 6th graders navigate through the overdrive app, Sora, read aloud to 5th graders daily at 2pm, introduce kinders to book exchange, plan book birthdays, author visits and... yeah, that was just today. Makes me so happy that I'm leaping...

   

Yes, I Still Do Dewey

I had a great lesson on Dewey with the fourth graders on Thursday.
"Are we having fun?"
"Yes!"
10 minutes later: "Are we having FUN?"
"YES!"

It WAS fun and it was a great way to get to know the Dewey Section.
I asked them when we started to assess how well they knew Dewey.
Not so much.
At the conclusion of our lesson? Experts. lol.

NYC School Library System has a wonderful, comprehensive curriculum called the Empire State Information Fluency Continuum (ESIFC), created by the incomparable Barbara Stripling and her team in 2009.  Reimagined this spring, I highly recommend you take a look at it, if you haven't already.  Many of us in New York State turn to it frequently. I took one of the documents, spruced it up a bit, crossed my fingers (as I usually do almost every lesson) and hoped it would be a success.

Students had to log into their Google Classroom accounts (I am trying to go  paper free as much as possible this year), copy my document into their own drive and then they begin the scavenger hunt.

There is a Dewey Decimal "worksheet" in the Grade 3 IFC assessment.  I changed it up slightly and asked students to find books in a category and then take a selfie with that book.  It was an engaging, collaborative, lively lesson that incorporated not only Dewey skills but digital literacy as well. I knew it was a good lesson when kids asked if they can do it again tomorrow.

Alexis searching in the 600s.  Boys in the back in the 700s.

Jacob excited to find one of our favorite books translated in Spanish in the 400s.

There's more to the 300's than the 398s!

Ethan plowed through this activity. Future librarian for sure!

Nice job, Alexis! 

Is Dewey a thing of the past? Maybe?  But the thought of actually genrefying the library is overwhelming.  I have some bins for popular subjects: horses, sharks, dinosaurs, football, baseball, jokes, dogs, cats...It helps with shelving (I have an assistant in the library about 3 hours a day) and it makes my students feel successful in locating those highly sought after books. But going all the way? We are nowhere near that.  And so until then, we will continue to have FUN finding our way in the Dewey Section.

And finally, a tweet from the 4th grade ELA teacher.  Another compliment is when the classroom teacher thinks it's great lesson! Happy to get your students back in the Dewey Section (and beyond!), Mrs. Roe! You just say when!

Learning about the Dewey Decimal System in the library with Mrs. Rattner. @SchodackCSD @CastletonES @staceybethr pic.twitter.com/zeN0hHjYOI

— Amy McGarvey-Roe (@AMcGarveyRoe) September 12, 2019