Earth Day at CAC will be celebrated this year with a "Race to Save Planet Earth." This will include a fund-raising race around the CAC track and a recycled paper airplane competition.
In the recycled paper airplane competition, the paper airplane that travels the farthest will win. All paper airplanes must have the contestant's name and must bear an environmental message.
At the ES library, we've set out paper and paper airplane folding books. According to Ken Blackburn and Jeff Lammers, authors of the Kids Paper Airplane Book (Workman Publishing, 1996), the best paper airplanes to use when in a competition are 2 models they call the Slice and the Count. These are actually rather basic airplanes, but very efficient ones.
Here are our paper airplane books. Once the airplane competition is over, they will be available for general checkout. Remember that you can place a hold on a library book once you log in to the library catalog with your CAC single-sign-on, so you should be able to place holds on these books if you want to continue your journey with paper airplanes.
Provides information on the principles of aerodynamics, suggestions for designing airplanes, and instructions for folding paper planes and playing games with them. Includes a poster and sixteen model planes.
Presents full-color illustrated instructions for creating a number of simple paper airplanes, and offers advice on paper sizes and types, basics of folding, principles of flight, classic and modern designs, and airborne origami.
Presents illustrated, step-by-step instructions for folding twelve different aircraft from a square sheet of paper, and includes hints on how to achieve good flight performance.
How can I read in a way that lets me trace themes in these stories and think about the author’s craft?
How does talking about books encourage and grow ideas?
To help answer the first question, I collected fiction and non-fiction resources from our print and digital collections on a libguide. Normally, I gather resources for students and post them on the Visual Tab of the library catalog, but this time around I thought that it might be a good unit to introduce our fifth graders to the libguides they'll be using in middle school. Also, libguides allow me to include more information about the different resources than the Visual Tab does.
The grade 5 historical fiction libguide has tabs for different time periods, corresponding to historical periods reflected in the novel sets the grade 5 students will be reading. On each tab, there is a selection of non-fiction books and links to our databases for each period, and a selection of picture books set in that period. The grade 5 students will be using the non-fiction information to gain an understanding of the historical context for their book club novel. Along with the picture book selections, they will be looking for connecting themes. This is deep reading work, and I'm very pleased to be helping them become even more expert readers.
Update 14 March, 2016: Just ended a class with one of the grade 5 classes and was delighted to hear students expressing how understanding the historical context of a novel will help them comprehend it better. That's why I love collaborating with teachers - it always leads to enhanced learning.
Thanks for the ES Student Leadership Team and their sponsors for organizing our Million Minutes of Reading Celebration next Thursday, March 17, from 3:15 to 5. It's Pajama Day in the ES, so keep your pjs on and head down to the ES Hall where we'll be showing the movie Minions. (Get it? A million "minions" of reading, hee hee!)
Admittance to the celebration is free. The SLT will be selling pizza for 10LE and juice for 5LE.
ES homeroom teachers will be sending home tickets to the celebration. Students who will be attending should bring them back signed and hand in to teachers by Tuesday. Teachers will then send a total number of attending students to the SLT by Tuesday. This will help the SLT order enough pizza and juice.
MS students should sign up via this online form or on paper at the MHS library.
This year I've added lots of resources to the grade 5 Visual Tab of our library catalog. Many of the links have been suggested by the grade 5 teachers themselves, and the Visual Tab is getting to be a great resource for fifth graders.
This is a screenshot of the Visual Tab page for their upcoming unit on earth science.
These links give access to videos and text to support their unit. Many of them are requested by the grade 5 teachers. To be posted here, these sites comply with our PAARC guidelines for websites. PAARC stands for Purpose, Authority, Accuracy, Relevance and Currency. (These criteria are also sometimes known as CRAAP, but since I worked with elementary students, I prefer PAARC.) PAARC merits a blog post of its own. Stay tuned.
This is a screenshot of the research links page on the Visual Tab. This includes a list of books about research and links to a bibliography template and citation samples. I'll soon be adding the PAARC poster to the page.
Here's a screenshot of the Visual Tab for the recently completed unit on world development and culture. This unit was only a few weeks long, so it was important to the teachers that students were very focused in their research. Having links to recommended sites helps students avoid the "Google-y eyes syndrome" where the sheer number of Google results means that they spend more time scrolling down the results page than on deep reading of the material they find.
We have Visual Tab pages for most of the ES social studies and science units of study at CAC. Pages for grades 3 and up are more fully stocked as we do a great deal of research support for those grades, but I do try to have some resources for all grades.
3. Click on the Visual Tab tab on the main search page.
4. Navigate using the picture clues. The social studies and science links are on the CAC Units of Study page.
This is the same regardless of what grade level you are interested in. Please do take a look at the resources on the Visual Tab and let us know if you or your children find them useful.
This post is dedicated to my fellow teacher librarians and holds what I learned by leading the CAC Million Minutes of Reading Challenge.
Do you want to lead your school or organization in reading one million minutes? These are the steps we followed at CAC.
Step 1: Come up with the idea
At CAC, we have to credit Dr. Jailan Abbas for the idea. She first heard of the Million Minutes of Reading at a conference. She came back armed with a little paper calculator that showed how many minutes of reading per student would be needed to reach a collective million. For a school of 300 students, the calculator said it would only require each student to read 20 minutes a day for one school year. Since between the elementary school and the middle school we have about 500 students, we knew it was doable.
Step 2: Come up with the rationale
We presented the idea to the ES administrative team, and because they are the super supportive leaders they are, they gave us the go ahead to present to the teachers. The MS principal was also present at that first meeting and he said that even if the ES didn't do it, they would!
We considered that setting this collective reading goal would:
help provide motivation to read and maintain consistent reading practice
build community through a shared goal
promote CAC core values of perseverance, integrity and responsibility
The CAC Core Values were rolled out this year and tying the Million Minutes of Reading Challenge to these dispositions helped reinforce the values.
Click here for the presentation to the ES faculty. We wanted to reassure our teachers that logging minutes would not be time consuming for them. Click here for the survey form we used to poll teachers on their interest in the challenge. While a few expressed some concerns, most were happy to support the initiative and we moved ahead.
Step 3: Come up with a way to track the minutes
Once we had the approval of the admin and the faculty, it was time for the nitty gritty details of how to track our reading time.
If you read the presentation above, you saw that we had 2 options for tracking our reading time: through Reading Rewards, a paid subscription, or through an in-house Google Form. Although Reading Rewards had lots of very attractive bells and whistles, our faculty preferred using a Google Form. They considered it an easier and less time-consuming option that would focus on the reading challenge. Creating the form and manipulating the data was a learning curve for me, but I did enjoy putting it all together.
I created a Google Form that required patrons to log in with their school username and password. This helped us keep the survey in house and also helped us identify individuals who might have entered too large amounts. The Google Form was linked to a Google Sheet with all the responses, all 2,461 of them. I created several pivot tables on separate tabs of the Google Sheet to track the percentage achieved towards our goal, the number of minutes by division (ES/MS), the number of minutes per house team, and the number of minutes by homeroom.
Creating pivot tables was the hardest part of all of this, but with the help of data guru and CAC curriculum coordinator David Chadwell and the Google Sheets Help pages, I had handy charts of the incoming data.
For example, here is a screenshot of the total minutes per homeroom.
And here is a screenshot of our percentage read pie chart. It charts one million minutes against the difference between one million minutes and the accumulated total. The chart self-updated with each entry.
(Actually, the above is an earlier version of the chart and I had programmed it wrong, but I include it here as an illustration because we've completed the challenge and exceeded it, one of the values for the actual chart are negative and won't display so I can't show a real time screenshot.)
Step 4: Come up with a way to publicly keep track
We had the electronic display but we needed a way of keeping track that we could all view. The display had to be large enough to be seen from a distance, be placed in a common ES & MS area, be durable and perhaps reusable, be colorful, be reasonably priced and be easy to update.
After several design iterations, this is the design we had printed on a big vinyl chart which we placed close to the front gate of school and in full view of entering students. It cost about 50 US$ at a local print shop and included the stickers to fill in as we progressed along. We didn't ask for them, but the print shop threw in several extra stickers in each of the four colors: purple, orange, yellow, and green. Credit to the design goes to Lena Rezk, the middle high school library assistant.
The colored stickers have 25,000 printed on them as they represent 25,000 minutes read. I checked the running total often to update the chart. At one point, one whole class of sixth graders entered the wrong total and the electronic chart said we were up to 800,000 minutes. The teacher called the next morning to tell me she's given the students wrong numbers. We deleted all the MS entries from the day before and the running total went down to 600,000. By then though, I had already added the 9 extra stickers and had to peel them off. Luckily, they came off easily and still had enough sticky on them to be put back a couple of weeks later when we reached 800,000 for real.
Step 5: Come up with ways to publicize and motivate
We gave ourselves 5 months to read one million minutes. We started strong, with articles in the school newsletters, grade level blogs, the MS Daily Bulletin, the ES's CACN daily broadcast and the CAC ES Library and the CAC MHS Library's Facebook pages. Here are 2 of our spots on CACN, created with students who are part of the library lunch crowd.
I also created a how-to video for students. This was shared via CACN and with teachers.
We also had a beautiful poster and matching bookmarks, once again designed by our library assistant Lena Rezk. Adding a QR code to the poster and bookmarks was meant to facilitate logging of minutes. We had the bookmarks copied in black and white onto colored cardstock to keep costs down.
We knew that we had 2 possible problems: that students would cheat and that they would lose interest. To combat both problems, we wrote up articles for the school newsletters, grade level blogs, the MHS daily notices and the ES's CACN daily broadcast, highlighting the CAC Core Value of integrity and how logging with integrity was a good way to practice that core value.
Twice in the first few weeks, we had students who entered large numbers just to see what happened. Both times the students involved, identified by their username which the form collects automatically, were contacted personally by me and shown how their experiment skewed everyone's results. We didn't have any problems on that score after that. Some MS students inflated their numbers, but we checked with their language arts teachers when the numbers were high.
Motivation did lag sometimes. There were days in which we felt we would never get there, but especially towards the end, when the display started sprouting green stickers, interest re-blossomed. Our library assistant, Lena, designed a poster and bookmarks, with QR codes to make entering numbers easy from mobile devices.
One particularly effective motivator was inviting the 12 top loggers to lunch with visiting authors. This happened towards the end of the five months and it sparked continued interest as the numbers mounted. If we hadn't had authors visiting and willing to offer themselves as the prize, we would have come up with some sort of competition to get everyone excited again.
Step 6: Come up with a way to celebrate
From the very beginning, the one question people asked was, What happens when we reach one million? To me, just reaching the goal would have been a celebration in itself, but we ended up having to offer a school-wide celebration as the reward. Luckily for the Million Minutes Committee, the ES Student Council offered to organize it. We'll be having that on March 17, after school. All ES and MS students are invited.
Here's a video celebrating reaching our goal.
Music credit: "Our Story Begins" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
So that's my how-to. I'm sharing because I would have liked to have this when we first started thinking how to go about leading our school. Thanks to our Million Minute Committee and the CAC ES and MS administration for their support.
Here it is, the historic moment when we reached our goal!
In October 2015, we challenged the ES and MS to collectively read one million minutes. This weekend, we reached our goal. The Million Minutes of Reading committee thanks every one who logged his or her time spent reading. Now we get to celebrate with a ES/MS celebration on March 17, which will be planned by the ES Student Council with input from the MS Student Council. Details will be published in the Eagle Eyes newsletter.
We are gearing up for our second author visit of the year, with not one but two authors coming to CAC on February 16 to 18. The 2 Steves, as British authors Steve Barlow and Steve Skidmore are known together, will be presenting to the elementary and middle school. The 2 Steves write high-interest, low readability books in a choose-your-own adventure format that is very popular among our upper elementary school students. I have the good fortune to host them in China, at my previous school, and the visit was a huge success with students, teachers and parents. They are dynamic and fun, and we're in for a great time!
Want to lunch with the authors? Students, keep logging your minutes for the Million Minutes of Reading challenge because the top 12 readers in the MM will be invited to lunch with them. Log your minutes with integrity!
During the authors visit, Diwan Bookstore will be here selling copies of their books for signing, from 3:15 to 3:45 each day. These books were available at the December book fair, so if anyone already purchased a book, bring it to be autographed!
I made a mistake at the book fair and didn't purchase print copies of the books for the library. We will be getting a full set soon. Luckily, we have 28 ebook titles on Overdrive, and we have spent these last two weeks demonstrating to grade 3 to 5 students how to access them.
Overdrive is the web service that holds our ebook collection. To access our ebooks, patrons will need their CAC single-sign-on username and password. Each patron can check out 3 books at a time, and read them (or listen to them in the case of audiobooks) on up to 3 devices.
Here's how I've been teaching the grades 3 to 5 to access our Overdrive titles.
3. Log in to the library catalog with your CAC single-sign-on or the Quick Login.
4. Scroll down the home page to the Overdrive icon and click.
5. Enter your CAC single-sign-on again when prompted.
6. Browse the collection from the main page or search for specific authors.
To see the 2 Steves books, enter Steve Barlow or Steve Skidmore in the search field.
Since the 2 Steves books are so popular, you may need to place a hold on the titles you are interested in. As soon as you finish a book, please return it. Overdrive will return books on the expiration date on its own, but since so many of us have holds on the books, please return them "manually." Come see us at the library if you don't know how.
