What's Happening at the BSS Library?

It's the last week before Christmas vacation! We read some more Christmas books and I challenged a few classes to create a Christmas item out of LEGO. I gave them a card and they had to use the LEGO pieces to create the item, and they were very creative! One of the third grade classes listened to the story Oskar and the Eight Blessings, using the Novel Effect app to hear sound effects.  They were amazed that the app knew what place I was in the book to play the appropriate sound.  Very cool!  We also had a third grade meeting of Battle of the Books. MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL! CHRISTMAS STORIES AND LEGO CHALLENGE 3RD GRADE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS MEETING I got the third grade Battle of the Books participants together to meet with their teams.  They went through the book list and made sure someone was reading each book.  Hopefully students will have a chance during vacation to read a little bit!

We read lots of Christmas books this week! Red and Lulu, Stick Man, Maple and Willow, Who Will Guide My Sleigh Tonight, Humphrey's First Christmas, Silver Packages, Click Clack Ho! Ho! Ho!, and It's Christmas David were some highlights. RED AND LULU BY MATT TAVARES This book is so beautiful.  It tells the story of two cardinals whose tree is chopped down with Lulu still in the nest!  Red can't believe it when he comes home after gathering breakfast to see their tree loaded on the back of a huge truck, which is driving away.  He follows the truck to New York City, but he eventually loses sight of it.  He can't believe his eyes when he is drawn to people singing Christmas carols around the huge, beautifully lit tree at Rockefeller Center and realizes that is HIS tree! He has a happy reunion with Lulu, and they stick around the area and make their home in Central Park.  In the author's note, Tavares shares that the star on top of the Rockefeller tree weighs 55...

It was another short week with the snow day and a professional day.  But it's December, and that means we can start reading Christmas books!!! There are so many great ones! I've included some of my favorites at the end of this post. LOCOMOTIVE IN 5TH GRADE In Social Studies, 5th Graders are learning about the Transcontinental Railroad.  We read Locomotive by Brian Floca, which is a beautifully illustrated book which describes what the first passengers experienced as they traveled West on the transcontinental railroad in the summer of 1869. The book is full of maps and diagrams of the parts of the locomotive, and it was awarding the Caldecott Medal in 2014 as well as the Sibert Award for nonfiction. PARTS OF THE BOOK In 2nd grade, we read A Book is Just Like You and talked about all the parts of a book.  Just like us, books have a name (title), a family (author, illustrator, publisher), a birthday (copyright date), and a spine to hold us all toget...

In this very short week we read some more Thanksgiving books. Here are two! BALLOONS OVER BROADWAY BY MELISSA SWEET Watching the The Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade has been a tradition for many families. But how did this tradition begin? I read Balloons Over Broadway with several of my classes this season, which tells the biography of Tony Sarg, who invented the first character balloons for the floats for the biggest parade around on Thanksgiving. Incredible illustrations by Melissa Sweet make this picture book biography as inviting as a warm Thanksgiving gathering!  I did hear that it might be too windy this year to include the giant characters. After I talked them up to get the students excited about watching the parade, let's hope that the forecast changes! THANKSGIVING ORIGAMI! As a fun way to kick off the break, 5th graders made origami turkeys.  We based the project from the book  More Thanksgiving Origami  by Ruth Owen. It was a bit challengin...