Dewey Decimal Fun & Jack Prelutsky's It's Thanksgiving

3rd-6th graders are so SMART! This week, I have been testing their non-fiction shelving skills and most students are masters of Dewey! I've also been using a worksheet from The Complete Library Skills-Grade 3. The page Ordering Dewey Call Numbers has been a hit.

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With my younger grades, I am teaching them how to say "Prelutsky" and reading to them from It's Thanksgiving. They have been loving these poems. Some of the classes have a couple of them memorized because their teachers have shared them. We are having a great time this week!

At Halloween (with kindergarten) we recite the poem "5 Little Bats" and give students a copy of the poem and a bat finger puppet. Making your own finger puppets is simple. Cut out the shape you want, cut 2 slits in it and slide it over your finger (pictured to the right.) The kids love it and think it is so fun to have their own bat to keep. Below is the poem. I have them do the actions with their finger puppets.

5 little bats sitting on the floor

(have puppet sit on their knee)

1 flew away and there were 4

4 little bats sitting in a tree

(make a tree with fingers spread apart)

1 flew away the there were 3

3 little bats tasting witches brew

(make a cauldron with one hand cupped)

1 flew away and there were 2

2 little bats just having fun

(fly your bat through the air)

1 flew away and there was 1

1 little bat who likes to pretend

Won’t fly away - he is your friend

(have bat sit on their shoulder or head)

Halloween Books

I asked for Halloween ideas and here are the responses I received... (I'll add others as I get them)

Thank you to those that shared!

Andrea Chapman - I think I posted on the blog last year about Goodnight Goon. I read Goodnight Moon and then read Goodnight Goon and talk about parodies...it's so fun! The kids love it!

Carissa Allen - There's also Dr Seuss' What was I scared of?

Linda Bethers - Maybe "Tell Me a Scary Story...But Not Too Scary" by Carl Reiner. I had parents and teachers ask for it BUT I definitely think it's too scary for younger grades (the art work). My older students love it.

Vickie Hovik - One of my favorite halloween books is The Perfect Pumpkin Pie by Denys Cazet. It's not really scary, but I order those eyeball suckers from Oriental Trading and give each child a sucker at the end of their visit. The younger classes who pass the office on their way back to class bend down and hold their 'eyeball' up in the office window on their way past. The office staff gives off a few gratuitous shrieks and it’s a good time.

Linda Morgan - I read scary story by Carl Reiner, read it first, it is a fun book with a fun CD, but I did have a mom complain about it, oddly enough the kids loved it, she did not like that her student brought it home.

Danette Fullmer - Jerry Seinfeld wrote a book called Halloween. It is hilarious, teachers and students all love it. It's not scary.

Carl Reiner has a book titled Tell me a scary story - but not to scary! Kids all like that one too. It comes w/ a CD of him reading it.

We are sharing poetry in our library for National Poetry Month. Undoubtedly, one of the favorite poets among students is Shel Silverstein. Here is great site that has Shel Silverstein poems and activities on it...

http://www.shelsilverstein.com/html/poetry.html

Wordle!

A cool website for those who like to play with their words is http://www.wordle.net/ It allows you to enter text and make your own word collages--you choose the font, the colors, and the style and it automatically arranges it for you! Here's one I did from the first chapter of one of my favorite books--can you guess which one it is?



They do have a saved gallery of other people's Wordles, which can sometimes get a little dangerous, so be cautious if using this with a class. But it's a great tool for teachers and librarians who want to jazz up the way they introduce a book or topic.

I used the screen capture function to save the graphic--on my Mac, it's Command-Shift-4 (pressed all together), and then you can click and drag a window around what you'd like to copy and it will save it to your desktop.