The One Where We Say Thank You

All of the books in the Elephant and Piggie series by Mo Willems are pretty much the most popular books in our library. It is a rare occasion that we have any on our shelves and we have multiple copies of all of them. Most of the time they get snatched off our shelving cart! At the moment, I Am Going is our #1 book to be checked out (that's for the whole library!).

When I read that Mo Willems had written the 25th and final book in this series, I knew I had to pre-order a copy. The Thank You Book had it's book birthday (otherwise known as the day the book is introduced to the world) on May 3, 2016. I felt very lucky to get a copy that day - it was a celebration after all!

I shared the book with all of the K-1 kids at Memorial School and I can tell you I never got tired of reading it, even though I read it aloud 16 times! We all LOVED the book. What a brilliant way for Mo Willems to end this beloved series.

Students and I talked about what we loved about these characters and the stories. We took a look at the special post Mo Willems wrote to celebrate this final book. Mo has declared the month of May as Thank-O-Rama Month. He, along with Gerald and Piggie are thanking all of their readers and they are taking this thanking very seriously. One of the ways Mo is saying thank you is by teaching us how to draw Piggie. Hope you enjoy the following pics from a few of my classes:

Learning how to draw Piggie by watching Mo Willems via video

Mo is a great teacher!

He taught us how to make a "moval"

Mo said we weren't done until we signed our names

Proud and happy kids

Saying thank you to Mo

After drawing our piggies, we all thought about who we wanted to say thank you to, afterall, it's Thank-O-Rama Month!

Dear Mo Willems,

Thank you for writing 25 Elephant and Piggie books. We love them.

Love from, Memorial School

Learning About Non-Fiction

Our students are very fortunate for many reasons, but the one I am highlighting here is about our annual Author Visit. Our PTO always sponsors these visits. We have had some amazing authors in the past including Grace Lin and David Biedrzycki. This year we decided to invite an author who writes non-fiction books. We spend a lot of time teaching our students about text features in non-fiction books, about searching for information, about writing and about drawing "true" illustrations to go with our work. We thought author Melissa Stewart would be a great choice. Our students love her (more than 180) books and we have many of them in our library.

It was a thrill for our young learners to meet a real author and for many to purchase an autographed book by Melissa. All classes read a few of Melissa's books prior to the visit. First graders in Mrs. Paget and  Mrs. Ravinski classes made welcome posters which were hung around the school. Mrs. Teany's kindergarten students each created a poster about one of Melissa's books. It was a thrill for sure when she looked at each drawing and made comments about them. She loved the posters so much she took them home one night to show her husband!

Here is a very short video showcasing the kindergarteners posters. Enjoy!

Here are a few photos from the visit:

Even our Preschoolers had a session with Melissa Stewart!

Kindergarten class

Looking at each and every poster made by students

Autographing a student's book

First graders with a few of their welcome posters

Thank you Medfield K-8 PTO for supporting our literacy program at Memorial School! We are so grateful :-)

Update May 1, 2016: Melissa Stewart was awarded the New England SCBWI (Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators) Crystal Kite Award for her

book Feathers Are Not Just For Flying. 

Congratulations, Melissa! Our students will be very excited to hear this news.

"Trendsetting" with KIBO's!

Thought it was time to give an update about our KIBO project. Last June I submitted a grant to the amazing Medfield Coalition for Public Education (MCPE) for two KIBO's. The grant was approved! We started using them in the fall with three kindergarten and three grade 1 classes. You can read about our 1st experience using KIBO's here.

In the meantime, something most unexpected happened. The Tufts DevTech Lab (which provides 'resources to teachers, parents  and anyone interested in using robotics in early education classrooms') asked if I would like to be featured as one of their "Teaching Trailblazers." Whoa, what an honor! 

Click here to read the entire Early Childhood Robotics Network interview

Back to planning our KIBO curriculum...We were very pleased with our first KIBO lesson but realized quickly that it would be a much better experience for our students if we had more KIBO's. Julie Colantoni, Meredith Teany and I wrote a new grant requesting eight more. We are so grateful that the MCPE approved this request. We now have 10 KIBO's at Memorial School!

We've been using our 10 KIBO's for the past two weeks and I can say for sure that this is the way to go. The whole class can now use the KIBO's at the same time and work in groups of 2-3 students per KIBO, which is how they are meant to be used. The kids loved having another opportunity to use KIBO and learn about more of the sensors and blocks. Each student had the opportunity to try out all of the jobs: planner/programmer, checker, scanner, and the very important, push the start button.

Mrs.McAvoy sharing the How to Make KIBO Work How-To Book, which her students wrote. It was the perfect way to begin our 2nd KIBO lesson.

Going forward, we will dig deeper into what our students can do with our KIBO's and learn from using robotics. We can't wait to use our KIBO's with more students this spring. 

Many, many thanks to the strong support from our principal, Dr. Melissa Bilsborough and to the MCPE.

Melissa Stewart is Coming to Memorial!

We are very excited to announce that Melissa Stewart, an award-winning author of more than 150 science books for children, will be visiting our school April 5 and 6. She has always been fascinated by the natural world and is passionate about sharing its beauty and wonder with readers of all ages. Melissa will be presenting to all Memorial students during her two day visit. We are grateful to our PTO for sponsoring this literacy event.

If you would like autographed copies of her books, please print out a copy of the order form. All orders are due, with payment, by March 16. 

Order form: https://goo.gl/KcqRE5

5 Books That Teach Kids What It Means to Be a Kind Person

I love this post so much I just had to (kindly) share it :-)

http://www.readbrightly.com/books-that-teach-kids-to-be-kind-people/

Library Love ❤️❤️❤️

It's almost Valentine's Day - time to share some Library Love! 

Happy Valentine's Day and Happy Reading!

Love from Mrs. Groden and Mrs. Redding xoxoxo

Kinders, KIBO's and More!

                                     

Memorial School was so lucky to have the Medfield Coalition for Public Education (MCPE) fund a KIBO Activity Center from Kinderlab Robotics last June. This center includes two KIBO robot kits, curriculum materials and two hours of Professional Development Consultation via Skype. 

After discussing how we would roll out our new robots, Dr. Bilsborough, our principal, and I decided to introduce our KIBO's at grade level meetings and to ask who might be interested in piloting this new program. To my delight, SIX classroom teachers eagerly signed on.Three of our kindergarten teachers and three of our grade 1 teachers. Perfect!

We kicked off the PD training with a Skype session with Amanda Strawhacker from Kinderlab Robotics. We had an amazing hour of learning the why's of using robots with young children and the basics of using KIBO with our students. We learned that students will be engaged as producers, creators, designers, programmers, engineers, problem solvers and communicators when using KIBO. We came away feeling excited to begin.

Here are a few of us at the Skype training - it was so interesting and engaging!

The next step was to set up times for the initial "Meet KIBO" lesson with the six classes. I met with the first two teachers to sign up after school one afternoon to plan out the lesson. We decided that we would do a whole class introduction to talk about coding, robots and to show them KIBO. We estimated the intro to take about six minutes. We would then break the class into four groups of 5-6 students. The classroom teacher and I would each take one small group at a time for the kids to have some hands-on time with KIBO and the Kindergarten classroom assistant would do another activity with the rest of the class. We planned on about 20 minutes per session and then we would switch groups. 

Luckily, we had more time to use than we had planned on because the intro took longer due to the students having so many thoughts and questions and the hands-on sessions could have gone on and on and on they were so much fun. We were also fortunate to have Dorothy Redding, our library assistant who took part in the training, to help facilitate and to take the following pics and videos.

Mrs. Teany and I introducing KIBO to her Kindergarten students.

We passed KIBO around so everyone could touch it and examine it up close and personally

Let the problem solving begin! Why wasn't KIBO moving? Ah, it needs wheels :-)

Students figuring out the programming or coding blocks.

Students putting together their first program for KIBO

The next day, Mrs. Colantoni's 1st graders met KIBO. They had their first introduction to computer science last December when we did the Hour of Code using the fabulous app ScratchJr. While Mrs. Colantoni and I were working with small groups of kids with our KIBO's, the rest of the class was using our iPads to create stories using codes in ScratchJr. Mrs. Redding supervised this activity. After about 25 minutes, we switched groups so everyone had a chance to use KIBO and ScratchJr. It was a Code-A-Palooza in the library! Sure wish I had more pics to share here, but we were all so busy we didn't have a dedicated photographer :-(

1st grade student scanning the blocks

Making hypothesis and then testing them

Just as I had written in the post about our Hour of Code, using KIBO is one of the funnest and best experiences I have ever had with kids. The excitement, the total engagement is unlike anything I've ever seen before. Our young students loved learning something new, loved the challenges they faced figuring out how KIBO works and the things they might be capable of making it do. Oh, the possibilities...! I truly cannot wait to introduce KIBO to our next four pilot classes and to see where it takes us.

Thank you MCPE, for this amazing opportunity for our students.