Creepy Carrots!

In honor of Halloween, we had a lot of fun with the Caldecott award book, Creepy Carrots! by Aaron Reynolds and illustrated by Peter Brown. 

As a choice in our Makerspace after book check-out, students had an opportunity to make their own creepy carrots! Some students chose to take their creations home while others allowed me to hang theirs up on our Wall of Awesome bulletin board.

The kids had so much fun! They did a great job, don't you think??

It's OK To Make Mistakes

Have you ever made a mistake? This is a question we explored during library classes recently. 

First, students had a chance to talk about mistakes they have made when we did a Turn and Talk. As you can see, they had a LOT to talk about!

Then I introduced them to the book, It's OK To Make Mistakes written and illustrated by the fabulous Todd Parr.

We had a chance to "meet" Todd Parr and listen to him read this book.

From KidLit TV 

Lots of mistakes are made in this story. There's an "Uh-Oh" on every page! But as the characters learn, it really is OK to make mistakes, it's how we learn. Mess-ups, accidents and mistakes, they happen to all of us no matter how old we are. 

We finished our lesson by following step-by-step directions on how to draw Todd from Todd Parr's website.

          

              

             

          

              

I love this message of It's OK To Make Mistakes for so many reasons. But I especially love having this "uh-oh's happen" mindset in our Makerspace and in all areas of our lives where we're learning, taking chances, making guesses, experimenting and then learning from our own "Uh-Oh's."

Todd Parr ends his books with these words: "Love, Todd." I will end this post the same way:

Love, Randie ;-)

PS  Photo cred to Dorothy Redding

International Dot Day 2016

International Dot Day is a BIG deal! This is our fourth year celebrating at Memorial School and each year it seems to be more fun with more school-wide participation. Our art teachers, Joe Knaus and Tracy Babin, read the book, The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds to all their classes and each student created their own dots. Some kids made "buddy dots" where each half of a circle was made by a different person and then put together to make a whole dot. Staff created dots and hung them outside their rooms. We read Ish which is the sequel to The Dot during library classes. These are both the kind of books you can read over and over again. Our young students relate to the characters and feel empathy for them. We had some great discussions about the stories and did a bunch of follow-up activities in the library. Our very first school spirit day was Dot Day where most students and staff wore dots or at least had a dot sticker. It was so much fun being dotty all day long ;-)

To see a quick glimpse of how Memorial School celebrated Dot Day, click on the (under two minute) video below. Hope you enjoy!