Lucy's Library Blast
February 27, 2017
Clickers and Plickers
Do you know that we have sets of Einstruction hand-held remote Clickers in the library that you can use to provide multiple choice questions for your students. Rapid response systems, also known as ‘clickers’ provide a means for teachers to quickly and easily administer a variety of assessments in the classroom. When teachers use clickers with they can take advantage of using existing items and tests to administer assessments and quickly review the results. Please make sure fresh batteries are installed.
Plickers is a free app that can be used on any IOS or Android operating system developed by Nolan Amy. Students will receive a card that has a number on it and the answer choices A, B, C, and D. Teachers can print these free at plickers.com as many times as they need. The teacher will use her smart phone or tablet to scan the class cards and begin to immediately see student responses pop up on the screen. The student simply has to hold the answer choice they choose at the top of their card. This wonderfully simple activity can be used for pre-assessments, checks for understanding, polls or class surveys, tickets out the door, TCAP review, etc. Plickers is a great way to infuse technology into your classroom to make a teacher's life easier. Plick here for more info: https://www.smore.com/4ck5-got-plickers
When is a table not a table?
When you hear the word table, you probably think of four legs and a top. But many simple sounding words are harder to grasp than you might assume.
Imagine a student with a narrow understanding of table encountering the word in these contexts:
Science Lab: Record the results from each trial in the table.
Math Performance Task: Refer to the table for the distances between cities.
Social Studies Article: The subcommittee tabled the discussion until after the hearing.
Multiple meaning words — like table — frequently occur across academic subjects, often in unfamiliar contexts, and can be an invisible roadblock to learning for some of your students.
Vocabulary.com works with each student until they master all the meanings of every word they learn. Students start with the core meaning of a word and progress to secondary and tertiary meanings. Along the way, we present words in multiple contexts — not just definitions, but in real-world texts that they are likely to encounter in an academic environment. Click here for further info https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/under-the-hood/mastery-matters/?utm_source=notatable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=BTS1617 or here to sign up for a FREE account: https://www.vocabulary.com/signup/educator/?utm_source=notatable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=BTS1617
The Library will be closed from 9:10 - 1:55 today. You can find me in the library workroom.
Kwame Alexander
If you ask anyone who is reading for Battle of the Books who Kwame Alexander is, you will hear gasps of admiration. Mr. Alexander's book, Booked, is on the list. A book written-in-verse, it tells the story of a young man who is cruising through school when a bombshell announcement shatters his world. Mr. Alexander also wrote the Newbery winner, Crossover, another written-in-verse story about twins who must find a balance between basketball and books. He has also just come out with his newest book The Playbook, 52 Ways to Aim, Shoot, and Score in this Game of Life.
Alexander will be at Lipscomb University on April 19th at 5:00pm, free of charge. This is a wonderful opportunity to hear an award-winning poet, educator, and New York Times bestselling author.
FutureLearn - Teaching Literacy Through Film
FutureLearn is a resource of short 2 - 8 week FREE classes for teachers and others offered to meet 21st century teaching add-ons. I am currently taking a couple of classes re: Raspberry Pi computer programming. Take a gander at the Literacy Through Film class description and link below. By the way, FutureLearn comes out of the UK but as we are all globally technological, it is applicable to our use.
Recent research has shown film can be a powerful tool to help improve children’s reading and writing. It can also be used to develop a range of abilities - decoding, inference and analysis - as well as expanding creativity and improving vocabulary. In this online course, you’ll find out how you can help your students learn with film, with advice and insights from film education experts from the British Film Institute (BFI) and film education charity Into Film. https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/teaching-literacy-through-film?utm_source=newsletter_segment&utm_medium=futurelearn_organic_email&utm_campaign=fl_february_2017&utm_term=22_02_2017_first_name_our_latest_teaching_courses_for_you
For a link to all the courses offered, including courses on STEM, research methods, educational rights, girls education, physical education, and much more click here: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/categories/teaching-and-studying?utm_source=newsletter_segment&utm_medium=futurelearn_organic_email&utm_campaign=fl_february_2017&utm_term=22_02_2017_first_name_our_latest_teaching_courses_for_you
Fun activity for middle grade readers: Act out a scene from a sports novel!
Get students who love sports interested in reading fiction with this fun group activity!
Have students write a short script and act out a scene from a sports novel. Students will learn how to transform an action-packed narrative into script form and convey information about the characters and plot to an audience who hasn't read the novel.
Click on Activity #4 (on the right) to download the full activity and try it out in your classroom. Download Activity #4!
Making the Team is great novel to use for this activity — with diverse characters and a story about competition between friends who are trying out for the same basketball team, middle grade readers will find lots of relatable situations and characters to act out.
When Hannah doesn't make the basketball team at her middle school and her best friend does, an unexpected new friend helps her regain confidence and learn how to set goals in hopes of making the team in high school.
Or, check out 3 other brand new books in the Sports Stories series to use with this activity like Tagged Out (boys' baseball), Two Strikes (girls' baseball), and Ugly Kicks (basketball).
This and 20 more activities are available in our FREE resource guide, plus printable blackline masters!
Happy 113th Birthday, Dr. Seuss. March 2nd. His books aren't just for kids...
Theodor Seuss Geisel wasn't actually a doctor (at least not until his alma mater, Dartmouth, gave him an honorary PhD), but his unique poetic meter and leap-off-the-page illustrations made him one of the most successful children's writers in history. Here's a little background on some of his greatest hits.
1. The Lorax is widely recognized as Dr. Seuss' take on environmentalism and how humans are destroying nature. Groups within the logging industry weren't very happy about it and later sponsored The Truax, a similar book—but from the logging point of view. Another interesting fact: the book used to contain the line, "I hear things are just as bad up in Lake Erie," but 14 years after the book was published, the Ohio Sea Grant Program wrote to Seuss and told him how much the conditions had improved and implored him to take the line out. Dr. Seuss agreed and said that it wouldn't be in future editions.
2. Dr. Seuss wrote The Cat in the Hat because he thought the famous Dick and Jane primers were insanely boring. Because kids weren't interested in the material, they weren't exactly compelled to use it repeatedly in their efforts to learn to read. So, The Cat in the Hat was born. "I have great pride in taking Dick and Jane out of most school libraries," he said. "That is my greatest satisfaction."
3. Green Eggs and Ham. Bennett Cerf, Dr. Seuss' editor, bet him that he couldn't write a book using 50 words or less. The Cat in the Hat was pretty simple, after all, and it used 225 words. Not one to back down from a challenge, Mr. Geisel started writing and came up with Green Eggs and Ham —which uses exactly 50 words.
The 50 words, by the way, are: a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you.
4. Horton Hears a Who! The line from the book, "A person's a person, no matter how small," has been used as a slogan for pro-life organizations for years. It's often questioned whether that was Seuss' intent in the first place, but when he was still alive, he threatened to sue a pro-life group unless they removed his words from their letterhead. Karl ZoBell, the attorney for Dr. Seuss' interests, says the author's widow doesn't like people to "hijack Dr. Seuss characters or material to front their own points of view."
5. Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now! It's often alleged that this book was written specifically about Richard Nixon, but the book came out only two months after the whole Watergate scandal. It's unlikely that the book could have been conceived of, written, edited, and mass produced in such a short time; also, Seuss never admitted that the story was originally about Nixon.
But that's not to say he didn't understand how well the two flowed together. In 1974, he sent a copy of Marvin K. Mooney to his friend Art Buchwald at the Washington Post. In it, he crossed out "Marvin K. Mooney" and replaced it with "Richard M. Nixon", which Buchwald reprinted in its entirety. Oh, and one other tidbit: this book contains the first-ever reference to "crunk," although its meaning is a bit different than today's crunk.
6. Yertle the Turtle = Hitler? Yep. If you haven't read the story, here's a little overview: Yertle is the king of the pond, but he wants more. He demands that other turtles stack themselves up so he can sit on top of them to survey the land. Mack, the turtle at the bottom, is exhausted. He asks Yertle for a rest; Yertle ignores him and demands more turtles for a better view. Eventually, Yertle notices the moon and is furious that anything dare be higher than himself, and is about ready to call for more turtles when Mack burps. This sudden movement topples the whole stack, sends Yertle flying into the mud, and frees the rest of the turtles from their stacking duty.
Dr. Seuss actually said Yertle was a representation of Hitler. Despite the political nature of the book, none of that was disputed at Random House—what was disputed was Mack's burp. No one had ever let a burp loose in a children's book before, so it was a little dicey. In the end, obviously, Mack burped.
7. The Butter Battle Book was pulled from the shelves of libraries for a while because of the reference to the Cold War and the arms race. Yooks and Zooks are societies who do everything differently. The Yooks eat their bread butter-side up and the Zooks eat their bread butter-side down. Obviously, one of them must be wrong, so they start building weapons to outdo each other: the "Tough-Tufted Prickly Snick-Berry Switch," the "Triple-Sling Jigger," the "Jigger-Rock Snatchem," the "Kick-A-Poo Kid", the "Eight-Nozzled Elephant-Toted Boom Blitz," the "Utterly Sputter" and the "Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo."
The book concludes with each side ready to drop their ultimate bombs on each other, but the reader doesn't know how it actually turns out.
8. Dr. Seuss' first children's book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was rejected 27 times according to Guy McLain of the Springfield Museum in Geisel's hometown. Only after Geisel bumped into a friend who'd just been hired by a publishing house did the book get the green light. "He said if he had been walking down the other side of the street," McLain told NPR, "he probably would never have become a children's author."
9. Oh The Places You'll Go is Dr. Seuss' final book, published in 1990. It sells about 300,000 copies every year because so many people give it to college and high school grads.
10. No Dr. Seuss post would be complete without a mention of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! In the Dr. Seuss-sanctioned cartoon, Frankenstein's Monster himself, Boris Karloff, provided the voice of the Grinch and the narration. Seuss was a little wary of casting him because he thought his voice would be too scary for kids. Tony the Tiger, AKA Thurl Ravenscroft, is the voice behind "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch." He received no credit on screen, so Dr. Seuss wrote to newspaper columnists to tell them exactly who had sung the song.