Online Summer Reading

The end of the year at a school is usually super busy. The ES library has been a hive of activity as well, and it's just kicking up into high gear as we race to collect all the library materials in time for the last day of school. Our school policy is to withhold report cards for students with overdue materials, and I always try my hardest to make sure that no child gets blocked. So far, in my eight years as a librarian, I haven't been able to accomplish that, but...there's still this year!

One of the things we do during the last weeks of school is promote our online reading materials. While students are allowed, and encouraged, to check out books for summer reading, we also know that in this day of ubiquitous Internet, online options are welcome, especially for our expat community. Summer means long travel times and ebooks pack light.

Here are a few options for online children's reading.

Online reading on the Visual Tab

The Visual Tab houses a treasure house of learning resources during the school year, and is available year round to students wherever there is an Internet connection. We have a page of online reading for children with links to our Overdrive collection (more on that later) and reading websites. 

The Current Events for Kids page has a collection of online news sites for children, from different countries and in different languages. As of the time of typing, I don't have a website for children in Arabic. If you know of one, please do let me know in the comments.

The Children's Online Books page has links to several websites offering online children's books, including our Overdrive collection.

The International Children's Digital Library has books in many different languages. Many of the books can be read for free. A free account allows users to upload books of their own.

Starfall is a literacy website for younger students. Many of our second and third graders welcomed it as a long lost friend, and spent a lot of the time in the lesson playing its educational games.

Storyline Online is sponsored by the Screen Actors Guild and the Entertainment Industry Foundation. It features famous US TV actors reading favorite picture books. This is a great mentor site for reading with expression.

Myths and Legends is a site that offers myths, legends and folktales from different countries. Most of the countries are Anglo-Saxon, with a sprinkling of stories from other cultures. The site also allows users to submit their own stories.

Lit2Go is a collection of stories, novels and poetry in mp3 format. It is sponsored by the University of South Florida. Download the mp3 and play through iTunes or an mp3 player app.

StoryNory offers stories in podcast episodes. Each episode can be downloaded individually or subscribed to through a podcast app.

YASync is a site that offers 2 free downloadable audiobooks per week of the summer. These are suitable for older students.

Overdrive eBook Collection

CAC has a large collection of ebooks available through Overdrive. Books can be read online or downloaded to a mobile device app. Instructions for using Overdrive can be found here. 

Although CAC has two separate collections for the elementary school and the middle-high schools, we cannot separate our ebooks separately, so parents are urged to supervise their elementary school students' ebook choices. 

To access the CAC Overdrive collection, patrons must log in with their single sign on username and password. 

A link to Overdrive is available via the Visual Tab's Children's Online Books, or by logging in to the library catalog. 

TumbleBooks

TumbleBooks is another collection of ebooks, featuring animated picture books, ebooks with a read aloud function, graphic novels, audiobooks, non-fiction videos and more. We actually have 2 different collections: the original TumbleBooks, for students up to grade 3 and TumbleBookCloud Junior, for students in grades 3 and above. However, after trying both out this week with grades 3 to 5, we all think that the original TumbleBooks has the better selection of ebooks. 

To access TumbleBooks, you will need to log in to the library catalog using the Quick Login or your single sign on. Scroll all the way down on the homepage and note the username and password for TumbleBooks.

Scholastic BookFlix and TrueFlix

BookFlix and TrueFlix are 2 other ebook collections. 

BookFlix was the original database. It pairs an animated video of a popular and/or award winning book with an ebook. It offers comprehension games, short author bios, and links to related websites. 

TrueFlix is for older students and links to social studies curriculum. It pairs a short documentary with an ebook. 

To access these, log in with the Quick Login or your single sign on to the library catalog, and scroll down to their links. Note the username and password listed for each. 

And there's more!

If you or your child is more interested in non-fiction material, explore the databases we provide. Find links and login credentials on the library catalog's homepage. (Access the homepage by logging in with the Quick Login or your CAC single sign on.)

Questions? Stop by the ES library for a demonstration. 

Do you have any favorite online reading sites for children that are not featured here? Please share them with us in the comments. 

Flat Lily Visits CAC ES

You may have heard of Flat Stanley, the main character in the book Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown. It was published in 1964 and has been a second grade favorite ever since. Many second grade classes take on Flat Stanley projects and send a paper visitor off to the world. Receiving updates from the Flat Stanley from around the world, the second graders learn about geography and world cultures.

We were happy to  host a Flat Stanley of our own, sent by Ms. Fallon's class in Massachussetts. The paper doll's name is Flat Lily and she is a girl. Luckily for all of us, she arrived just in time for the Egypt Festival.

Flat Lily arrived the afternoon before our Egypt Festival. Just in time for all the cultural activities and performances!

Egypt Festival is a day long celebration of Egypt and is ably organized by our Arabic teachers. We have performances and activities that take advantage of the richness of our host country's culture, and the whole elementary school (ES) participates. 

We started the day with an assembly where different grade levels presented numbers they prepared in their Arabic and Egypt Culture classes. There were dances, songs and skits all related to Egypt past and present. 

Our favorite was grade 2's number, when they listed facts about Egypt in Arabic and English. 

(Did you notice the background tapestry in the theater? It was created by one of the Egypt Culture assistants and is absolutely stunning.)

On the day of Egypt Festival, we all dress up in traditional Egyptian dress. Egypt is a big country and there are many different styles of dress, but they are mostly a variation of a tunic, called "galabeya." Galabeyas are worn by both men and women. The men's galabeyas are usually more somber, with pinstripes and solid colors. The women's galabeyas are often decorated with bright and colorful embroidery. Here is a grade 2 class sitting in the Egyptian tent which houses CAC's Arabic language collection in the library. Most of them are wearing a galabeya, but see the boy in the green shirt? That's an Egyptian soccer player uniform. Egyptians love soccer so he chose to dress up in that instead of the more traditional galabeya.

On Egypt Festival, the whole school joins in the celebration, so the library had a big collection of books on Egypt on display.

And of course the library had several copies of the original Flat Stanley book, plus several of the new series including The Great Egyptian Robbery, by Sara Pennypacker. 

Another part of Egypt Festival was listening to the hassabala martial band. Here Sharif poses with Flat Lily, and you can't see the band very well, but you sure could hear it on the day! It is lively music and we all loved being greeted by the band in the morning and being serenaded during our recess times. 

Baladi bread is Egypt's flat bread. It is baked in a clay oven. CAC has its very own oven in the back of the ES building, and a band of bakers was hired for the day to make baladi bread for everyone. It is delicious straight from the oven!

It was very hot last weekend so we never got to the pyramids, but that's okay because Flat Lily got to pose with King Tut at the pyramid making station of Egypt Festival. 

Every grade had a special activity for the day. The second graders made pencil cases and decorated them in the shape of Nubian houses. The Nubians live in the south of Egypt. Their homes are dome shaped to help keep the heat down. They are often colorfully decorated with tiles on the outside. 

During library time on Tuesday, the second graders listened to a story called Pepi and the Secret Names, by Fiona French. This book tells the story of Pepi and his artist father who is in charge of painting the inside of the pharaoh's tomb. Pepi tricks the animals of the desert to pose for his father by calling them by their secret names. We loved this book because readers are challenged to figure out the secret names by deciphering hieroglyphs. (Ancient Egyptians wrote in hieroglyphs. Each hieroglyph represented a different idea.)

The day ended with color and music as we all went back to the theater to enjoy a tanoura dance show. Tanoura dancing came to Eygpt from Turkey. Dancers spin around and around, and their colorful skirts lift up and swirl around them. It's a beautiful dance!

As a farewell gift, the second graders created galabeyas for Flat Lily to take home with her. She will be mailed back to the US today to make sure she gets there in time for the end of the Massachussets school year. Mar salaama, Flat Lily. Go with peace.

ES Library and Grade 5 Journalists Making Headlines!

The grade 5 unit recently embarked on a journalism unit in their literacy workshop. The ES library is very happy to support them in this unit, as we have many resources to help them in their journalistic endeavors.

All 3 classes came to the library for a session on journalism sources and how to access many from the library catalog.

Journalists must keep track of their sources. We ask our grade 5 journalists to maintain a bibliography of citations. Templates for the citations (in MLA format) can be found in their student planners or on the Visual Tab grade 5 page. Citing our sources is one of the ways we demonstrate our CAC core value of integrity.

1. Personal interviews and observations
• Journalists find stories in the world around them. Our grade 5 students are encouraged to do so as well. 
2. Written materials, e.g., primary sources and  magazines
• Primary sources would include letters, maps, recordings and other materials created at the time of the event being 
• Magazines and other periodicals - we have many childrens' magazines in the ES library. They are getting checked out frequently for this unit. We remind the students that magazines and other periodicals are often printed on flimsy, inexpensive paper and so they must take extra special care with them. 
3. EBSCO's Primary Search database -- link on the library catalog's Visual Tab Current Events  page and the Home page.

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• This is one of our subscription databases. It searches for keywords in children's magazines. 
• Students are encouraged to use subscription databases because they are reliable sources of information. 
• Primary Search database allows students to filter results by time, subject, publication, geography and other limiters
• It also provides a citation for the article in question. This citation can be copied directly onto a bibliography
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4. WebPath Express -- on the library catalog
   
• WebPath Express is the search engine for our Destiny catalog. It searches for keywords in a large collection of websites vetted by teachers and librarians. While it may not return the most current of articles, it does return relatively authoritative and reliable sources. 
• To create a citation for an article found through WebPath Express, students will need follow the formats given in their student planners or on the grade 5 Visual Tab for research skills. 
5. Kiddle.co -- link on the library catalog's Visual Tab Current Events page
   
• Kiddle.co is a search engine for kids. It uses a customized Google search to first find articles written for children, then articles written for adults but accessible to children and finally articles written for adults. 
• The News tab on the Kiddle.co site will look for articles in children's online news sites first. 
• To create a citation for an article found through WebPath Express, students will need follow the formats given in their student planners or on the grade 5 Visual Tab for research skills. 
• When looking at websites through Kiddle.co, students should consider our website evaluation criteria, PAARC. (P-purpose, A-authority, A-accuracy, R-relevance, C-currency)
6. Current events page on the Visual Tab
   
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• The Visual Tab has a "Current Events for Kids" button. That will take you to a page full of links to online newspapers and magazines for children, from many countries and in different languages. Unfortunately, each site has to be search separately, but for the most part, these online news sites are quite current. Facts should always be cross checked. 
• We do not have an online site for children's news in Arabic, so if you know of one, please let us know so we can add it to the page. 
7. LAST resort: Google search
• Google search should be the last resort, to be used only if none of the other sources produce the information sought. 
• For our journalism purposes, we often are interested in different perspectives, so we can focus our search results by using the code, "site:", and adding the 2 letter country code. For example, a search for "Olympics 2016 news site:.eg" will give us results of news published in or about Egypt. 

Journalists must have at least 2 verifiable sources for the information they report on. This forces journalists to double check their facts. Our young journalists will be held accountable to the same standard. Using this list of sources will ensure that they know where to look for information.

CAC Libraries Used Book Sale

 The CAC Libraries will be having an used book sale on May 11 and 12, from 8 am to 4 pm. Come browse through hundreds of gently used books for all ages - and in many languages - on the ground floor of the MS building, next to the library.

The CAC used book sale is open to all CAC community cardholders.

Proceeds from the book sale will be used for library projects, including charity. Last year, we were able to support 7 different charities with books and money thanks to our community's generous support.