In the Media Center (Quarter 2, Week 2)

Elementary Media Center

In the Media Center is going to be a new regularly appearing post from me. I plan to talk about what my students and I did the past week during their media classes. I am a K-12 media specialist who spends half days at the Elementary building and half days at the Middle School/High School building in our district of approximately 1300 students.

This semester I am starting my days at the Elementary building and seeing fifth graders and third graders on a four day rotation (50 minute classes) and traditional first and second graders on an alternate day rotation (25 minute classes). Our elementary school has a fixed schedule where all students in a grade level attend "specials" (art, media, music, and phy. ed.) at the same time so that their teachers have a common preparation time.

Fifth Grade

We spent most of the week learning to make citations before we begin our research projects. I wanted the kids to know how to make a citation from scratch even though we will mostly be using our school databases which provide citations to copy and paste. I will also be showing them Citation Machine and BibMe which will make citations for them.

Third Grade

Having now completed our book ad posters, we are beginning our unit on Internet safety by participating in the USA-SOS Internet Safety Challenge. One class has taken the pretest and begun the scavenger hunt already.

Second Grade

Continuing in our fantasy genre, I read the first two chapters of Knights of the Kitchen Table by Jon Scieszka. We also looked in the fiction section to find the rest of the Time Warp Trio series. We also watched a Mary Pope Osborne interview on Wednesday and did a worksheet locating information on a book's title and copyright page.

Thursday and Friday, students were in the lab using Up to Ten Kids. I finished assessing them to make sure they could navigate to the programs in the Second Grade folder.

First Grade

This week I read Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus by Mo Willems and we practiced determining Pigeon's emotions from the illustrations. We also did a worksheet on finding the author of a book.

On Wednesday, I read I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen. We got a chance to practice inference as we decided what happened to that hat stealing rabbit. We also did a worksheet to practice the alphabet and colored the resulting picture.

On Thursday and Friday, we went to the lab and navigated our way to the First Grade folder to find the link for Super Why! at PBS Kids.

That was week 11.