Grandfather Tang's Story

  Tangrams are ancient Chinese puzzles that are still used today by adults as well as children.

  A tangram begins with a square, which is then cut into seven standard pieces.  Each piece is called a tan.  When creating a picture, all seven tans must be used; they must touch, but none may overlap. 

  When tangrams are used in storytelling, the storyteller arranges the tans to show the shape of a character in the tale.  As new characters or story elements are introduced, the puzzle pieces are rearranged to represent the new character or new element.  

Cook Up a Good Book!

CHARLOTTE AWARD

Max's Words

What's the Big Idea?

This month's ELA Focus Skill is "Main Idea and Details".  Different grade levels practiced this skill with fiction and non-fiction texts!

Thesaurus TURKEYS!

The Library Genre-fication Project!

"Where are the scary books?"

"Where are the mystery books?"

For many years, students have run up to me asking these kinds of questions.  A lot of times kids know what type of book (genre) they want to read and would rather ask me than use the library catalog.

I always teach the importance of becoming an independent library user and I model strategies on how to match themselves with a good fit book.  Learning how to use the catalog and getting book recommendations from peers/teachers/booktrailers/websites are valuable, however, sometimes it's just not convenient in a short amount of time.  

Students find fiction books in alphabetical order by the author's last name, but after surveying the fourth grade about a possible change to "genre" shelving, the response was overwhelming.  Students understand the importance of remembering the author's name, however, I think a lot of kids don't discover many authors until they have found the genres that they enjoy.  It's impossible to highlight the hundreds of popular children's authors during their weekly library visit, and so I hope that this new organization in the library will get kids to discover new authors!  And when some authors begin to cross over into a different genre, I hope that kids will take a new direction as well!