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.
I will let you know how these both go next week!!
I hadn't heard about Destiny. Wonder if we would have that at school as well. Spine poems are so much fun. My students really liked when I published their spine poems on our class blog.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds exciting! I haven't tried book spine poetry yet, but I'd consider giving students a choice about whether they'd like to make their own or work with another student. It would be interesting to hear students making suggestions to each other, and debating about which texts to use...
ReplyDeleteYou could also try giving students a couple of parameters for them to use if they feel intimidated or they finish one poem and want to try another... (ie, a poem that is mostly 1 or 2 word titles; a poem that consists of books all the same color; etc.) You could also pass out tiny post-its with punctuation on each one, and encourage students to play with punctuation in their poems (ellipses, exclamtions, commas, etc.)
You also might consider borrowing a few cameras from others so that kids can take their own pictures and aren't lining up for you and waiting on you to photograph their masterpieces... (There's an app called Albumatic where you can take pictures and add them to an album that everyone can see in real time. It would be great to use if you had a few iphones in the room...)
Have fun!
marika