We're Celebrating Poetry!

As poetry month continues, SES students are participating in activities that have them reading, illustrating, and writing their own poems.

My library helpers, Brooklyn, Vivian, Bodie, and Margherita created this amazing "Poet-Tree" for my bulletin board!

Karli builds a poem

Alexandra, Mason, Kaden, and Nickolas write some graffiti poetry about pictures of ocean animals.

Mason and Margherita's finished graffiti poems

Tanner, Iain, and Mason created black out poetry with some old book pages.

Clay copies a poem to illustrate for Picture Poetry.

On April 24th, we celebrated Poem In Your Pocket Day.  Sophie wrote her own poem to carry in her pocket!  What an awesome writer!

This Week in the Library...

This week we're participating in some holiday-themed centers.  Here are some of our fabulous students taking part in the activities!

Milo and Alejandro listening to Maynard Moose Tales on the iPad at the listening center.

Endia and Page making light bulbs for our "Books Light Up Our Lives" bulletin board.  After they trace a light bulb onto colored paper and cut it out, students write the title and author of a favorite book.  Each bulb is then placed on the bulletin board!

Aizik coloring a tree ornament.  Students chose a favorite quote from a holiday story or song and wrote it on their ornaments before cutting them out and decorating them.

Alexa, Rileigh, and Craig coloring Gingerbread Glyphs to represent their reading preferences.  (For example, color the gingerbread man's hat red if you prefer fiction books, green if you prefer nonfiction.)

Alizay, Kelly, and Kodi writing some of their favorite holiday traditions on our chalk wall.

Mason, Moksh, Colton, and Blain discuss an interesting book.

Lately in the Library...

There's been a lot of activity in our library lately!  October has been a busy month so far!

Classes have been rotating through some library centers when they visit the library during their specials rotation.  Here are Landon and Adrian co-writing a story at the writing center.

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As part of our school-wide Read-a-Thon, we held a celebrity reader day, where visitors to our campus shared some of their favorite stories with our students.  Here are Shiloh and Carlee with their favorite celebrities, their dads!

And here are Bradley and Shelby with our superintendent, Dr. McNulty, who read several of his favorite stories to their class.

Mrs. Hannusch's class was thrilled to have some of our Tiger football players read to their class!

Perhaps the most popular celebrity to visit our campus was Sami (who also brought Ms. Murray along to read with her)!

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The library is a great place to display student work and projects, so I was thrilled to get to display Brooklyn's beautiful painting in a special spot on the library wall.

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And, finally, as the days get shorter and the weather cooler, SES students have been reflecting on their favorite things about fall and sharing those ideas on the library's chalk wall!

This Week in the Library...

This week, Smithville Elementary students have been learning about call numbers and about how fiction books are organized in our library.  They've been participating in several library centers, including a few that reinforce the ideas we've been exploring!

Mihyia writes a favorite sentence from her book on the chalk wall.

Kodi enjoys a sneak peek of some new library books at the silent reading center.

Angel uses the iPad to search our library catalog at the Wish List center.

LaDarian enjoys his new library books on a reading spot at the Silent Reading center.

Cole and Colton work together to match book covers to their correct spine labels at the Spine Match center.  They especially enjoyed using the iPod to check their answers when they were finished!

Hailee makes a book spine bookmark at the Book Spine center.

Amber plays an online game of Shelve It from Mrs. Lodge's Library to practice putting books in order on the shelf.

What great examples of kids hard at work and engaged in learning!