Lowell Library Newsletter
March 2022
Library in the Classroom
The Library Program had a successful transition to the classrooms at both Phillips and Lowell West. Each class worked hard to accommodate the changes to our curriculum and took time to enjoy the addition of new things with our little bit of extra time. We all miss our book collection but, in the meantime, enjoy new and old titles from classroom libraries, home libraries, and the public library!
What We Learned: March 2022
Kindergarten: We learned about:
- Mo Willems Author study
- Maps for information
- Fairy Tale elements: Beginnings and endings, characters, fantasy details
- Story elements: characters
- Retelling stories
- Fairy tales: Plots problems, rule of three, character values
Second Grade: Learned about:
- Seesaw Online classroom
- What is a computer?
- Software and hardware
- Artificial intelligence and machine learning
- Google Slides Explorations
- Citation of sources
- Writing a citation for a print book
- Computational thinking: decomposing tasks
- Data
Fourth Grade: Learned about:
- Audio and video as sources of information and for research
- Database searching
- Citations from a database
- Web evaluation review
- Reading news online
- Copyright
- Fair Use
Fourth and Fifth Grade: Copyright and Fair Use
Did you know that fourth and fifth grade students have a lot of questions about copyright and fair use? In fourth grade we explore what copyright is and why it is important to respect the intellectual property of other people. Fifth grade dives into the tricky concept of fair use and works in groups to discuss scenarios involving questions of fair use. Student's questions are specific, focused, interesting, and thoughtful. These lessons and discussions are part of the digital citizenship units at these grade levels and complement the research and information exploration students do in class.
First Grade: Magic Numbers in Fairy Tales
Kindergarten and first grade started their exploration of traditional literature with fairy tales. First grade learned that the numbers three and seven were "magic numbers" frequently seen in fairy tales from all cultures. Thinking back to our book of the week, The Three Little Pigs and the Somewhat Bad Wolf by Mark Teague, students illustrated a three they noticed in the story. This book contained a lot of threes and we saw some creative rememberings.
Please Return ANY Lowell Library Books You Find at Home!
- My child has a library book from before quarantine. What should I do with it? Please bring it back! There is no penalty for pre-quarantine books and I would love to have them back in the library so other kids can enjoy them.
- Will kids check out books after December? No, we will be storing our wonderful library until we return to Lowell in Fall 2023.
- Where can we access the databases and encyclopedias? Use the Lowell Library website and under SEARCH find a list of the databases students have access to through the school.
- What will students learn without the library? Don't worry! I selected a lot of books to continue our read alouds each week. We will also take this time to explore more aspects of our digital learning curriculum such as digital citizenship and computers as tools.
J.R.Lowell Library
Email: kelly.mccollum@watertown.k12.ma.us
Website: http://lowelllibrary.com
Location: 175 Orchard Street, Watertown, MA, USA
Phone: 617.926.7770
Twitter: @jrlowellreads