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.

Flying Paper Airplanes at the ES Library

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 a short video on how to fold "the Slice," or the classic dart paper airplane. (Click on the linked text for instructions.)

And here's how to fold "the Count," which is also called the Nakamura Lock. 

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.

	Kids' Paper Airplane Book, by Ken Blackburn Call number: E 745.59 BLA 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.
	The Kids' Guide to Paper Airplanes, by Christopher L. Harbo Call number: E 745.59 HAR Provides instructions and diagrams for making a variety of traditional paper airplanes.
	Super Simple Paper Airplanes, by Nick Robinson Call number: E 745.59 ROB 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.
	How to Make Origami Airplanes that Fly, by Gary Hsu Call number: E 736.98 HSU 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.

Supporting Grade 5's Historical Fiction Unit

Grade 5 students are starting a historical fiction unit in their reading workshop. The essential questions for this unit are:

• 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. 

Million Minutes of Reading Celebration next Thursday!

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.

Hope to see lots of readers there!

Supporting Grade 5 with the catalog's Visual Tab

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. 

Here's how to reach the Visual Tab. 

1. Visit the library catalog: http://library.cacegypt.org (Go ahead and bookmark this for quick access.)

2. Choose the elementary school collection. 

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.