Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Planning Projects

         Inspired by the March Slice of Life Challenge I have a couple ideas spinning in my head that I will be trying out within the next week. 

         After learning about Goodreads.com and being excited by all of the great literature everyone was sharing, I mentioned it to my librarian and thought it would be awesome to do something like this with my students. Would you believe she said we have access to a program that is built into our onloine library card catalog system (Destiny) that would do exactly that! It is called Destiny Quest but no one had ever taken the time to learn about it let alone incorporate it into their classroom.  It allows the students to set up thier bookshelves (Books I've read, Books I am reading, Books I want to read). Then they can rate the books (1-5 stars) They can even recommend books to freinds. Isn't this exactly what we want kids doing? reading books, talking about books, sharing books with friends! My librarian was gracious enough to stay after school with me and get everything set up for my students. I can't wait to share it with them!! I know they will be excited to dig into it too!


2nd project- Book Spine Poetry (of course, inspired by you guys)
I shared this idea with my Libarian when I heard about it. So her and I have been planning to do some Book Spine poetry with my students for poetry month, this month!!! Does anyone have any suggestions on the logistics of having a class of 24 students doing book spine poetry in the library? A couple of ideas we thought of:
  • assign each student a section of the library shelf (This will keep them somewhat contained not running all over the library, still lots of books but will provide them with a focus)
  • we plan to bring several rulers per student (They will use the rulers as shelf markers.  They will be able to reshelf the books themselves.
  • When they have their final book spine poetry created, I will take a picture of the spines of the books stacked together.
Any other helpful hints?
I will let you know how these both go next week!!