Fifth graders will be visiting Shaker Village in Canterbury, NH later this month. To make their trip a richer learning experience, we’re adding some resources that will be using in Social Studies over the next few weeks.
What is the box of black and white squiggly lines on the book?
What is black and white and squiggly all over? A QR code in the library!
What is a QR Code you may ask? Well the simple answer is a QR Code is a Quick Response Code.
It is a like a barcode that you find on a bag of potato chips. But QR code contains a lot more information than a barcode — So it can lead you to a web address, link you to a video or podcast, give you a cell phone number for a contact, send a text message to your phone, or just post a message to you. All you need to read a QR code is a QR reader — a free download on a smart phone or ipad.
In our library you will find QR codes on some of our books. These codes link you to book reviews from some of our students as well as publishers’ book trailers (book trailers are like movie trailers at the movie theater that tell you about upcoming new movies!) In the MVVS Learning Commons, QR Codes on books are like treasure hunts for book lovers. Watch this video as some of our students use an ipad with a QR reader.
Did you know that right from home you can access the Learning Commons collection online audio books from home?
Tumblebooks is an online service that gives you access to ebooks and audiobooks. Each book is also paired with games and activities so when you are done reading you can test your memory and have fun!
Originally only available for personal computers (any operating system), the service is now beginning to expand so you can also play some of their collection on an iPad.
On your mark, get set, READ! Last Monday Mrs. White got the school revving the engines and ready to read. The goal of this program is to get TEAMS of students to read 19,917 minutes — this equals the number of miles it takes to travel to all fifty state capitals.
At the younger grades, each class will be its own team. In the upper grades, teachers will break the class into teams. The teams will names themselves, keep track of their minutes read, and graph their progress. All students will have a reading log and will be encouraged to bring it in every two weeks to log the number of minutes they have read. Mrs. White and classroom teachers will give small incentives along the way to keep kids motivated to read.
What can you do support this program? Simple — just keep reading!
Our intrepid 4th graders have finished writing and recording a series of PSAs that explain the importance and usewfulness of various parts of a book. To listen to all these minute-long announcements just copy the feed line below into your browser’s address line. Good job, 4th graders!
feed://audioboo.fm/users/162055/boos.rss
This week we kick off our reading celebration by presenting the story of Flat Stanley to our children.
We’ve asked each family to help our project by sending an address of a relative or close friend across the country. Our children will be sending their ‘traveler’ with a letter of introduction.
We will send our traveler with a letter of introduction. The recipient will be asked to take pictures or include information about their state, and return the traveler along with a short letter about how he or she spent time in the new state. The recipients are encouraged to send pictures and/or a very small souvenir. When the travelers return to our school, we will plot their whereabouts on our map/globe and share the information received with the whole school. It will be a tremendous learning experience for your child. We are very excited about it!
Children will likely enjoy and benefit more from the project more by learning a little United States geography.
Here some links that we’ll introduce in the Learning Commons:
We have begun the cutover to our new home online for the Learning Commons. It will be a learning opportunity for all of us, and we hope that our new software platform will serve us all well. If you can’t find something from the old site here, you will be able to visit the old resource until we have finished our migration.
Thanks for bearing with us, and be sure to contact us with any ideas or feedback that come to mind.
