A Special NEW Place For SEL Resources From Our Friends At Follett

It's so important for all of us to focus on the social emotion learning of our students and to support our teachers and families in their social emotional health too. 

To support all of us, our friends at Follett have a special new site called SEL For Educators. 

As shared on the site, 

Follett is excited to provide schools and districts with tools to support connections among students, families, and fellow educators that you can use all year long. Our tools are for all faculty and staff at your school – we know everyone needs a reminder to take care of themselves!

There are lots of things on the site I am excited about but today, I focused on the... 

...Printable Activities as I prepared a new week at our school. 

There are several printable activities including Happiness Habits Checklist, Habit Tracker Bookmarks, 

Staff Bingo, Mindful Choice Board and Sticky Notes to Share. 

You will find all of these wonderful resources in the SEL Printable Activities folder, which makes it easy to download, print and use within your school community. 

I will be using these SEL printable resources in lots of different ways at our school and can't wait to share these ideas with all of you. 

You will find the NEW SEL For Educators site from Follett here, friends. 

I can't wait to hear how you will use them too. 

Supporting Our Youngest Digital Citizens With Books, Online Resources and Interactive Experiences!

There are many ways we can support digital citizenship within our schools and within the homes of our students and families.  

When we gather resources together to use throughout the year, I refer to several different things.  One is the ISTE Standards for Students. 

As the ISTE Standards for Students states, 

Students recognize the rights, responsibilities and opportunities of living, learning and working in an interconnected digital world, and they act and model in ways that are safe, legal and ethical.

It's important that our students understand what this means to them and to give them the knowledge, skills and experiences to support even our youngest learners.  

Here are a few resources that we use to support our students.  

We love the Be Internet Awesome Digital Citizenship Curriculum from Google for Education and Pear Deck.  

As shared on the Be Internet Awesome site, 

To make the most of the Internet, kids need to be prepared to make smart decisions. Be Internet Awesome teaches kids the fundamentals of digital citizenship and safety so they can explore the online world with confidence.

It focuses on the Internet Code of Awesome which includes 5 parts... Share With Care, Don't Fall For Fake, Secure Your Secrets, It's Cool to Be Kind, and When in Doubt, Talk It Out.  

And one of the best parts, there are interactive slides and flashcards by Pear Deck, tailor made for the Be Internet Awesome curriculum.  You will find these here to download to use with your students. 

Oh, and check out Interland!  Google gamified the Be Internet Awesome curriculum and gave our kids a place to test their knowledge and skills. 

As shared on the site, Kids can play their way to being Internet Awesome with Interland, an online adventure that puts the key lessons of digital safety into hands-on practice with four challenging games.

I also love using picture and nonfiction books to teach and support conversations and learning around digital citizenship.  

This Padlet is a place I have brought together lots of book to support digital citizenship.  

One of my favorites is Staying Safe Online which I wrote with Capstone.  Emily Arrow created the music and Kathryn Durst the illustrations.  We have the print book in our library and classrooms, and also have the eBook in Capstone Interactive.  

You can find this on Cantata Learning's YouTube here. 

In addition to using books, I love using the PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next articles from PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next Social Studies for The Internet (PebbleGo) and Technology and Society (PebbleGo Next).

In The Internet section, there are articles about Cyberbullying, Digital Citizenship, Internet Safety, My Digital Footprint, Social Media, Understanding Media, Web Pages and What is the Internet?

Within each article, there are different topics under the tabs that will support our digital citizens and the curriculum.  For example, check out the tabs under Digital Citizenship and think about how those tie into the ISTE Standards for Students and Be Internet Awesome curriculum. 

To support our learners, I put together these two choice boards to start the year.  

I added a QR code on each to make it easy to be scanned with a device. 

They can also be shared online in Seesaw or Google Classroom with the published link of the choice board. These tie in perfectly with the other resources we are using and support students in the classroom, library and at home with important information.  

You can make a copy of the My Digital Footprint choice board here and...

...I Am A Digital Citizen choice board here.  You can add links to the PebbleGo articles and eBooks, or make some changes and additions to make it work for your library and school. 

I will continue to make these around the different digital citizenship topics and PebbleGo articles and eBooks throughout the year as we add more digital citizenship and computer science topics and conversations. 

Feel free to add more books to the Padlet and let me know how you support your digital citizens too. 

Bringing Together Print and eBooks In A Very Special New Way For Our 2nd Grade Readers!

One of my favorite things about being a teacher librarian is dreaming up new ways to engage and inspire our readers as they connect to books, characters and series they love.  It's the best when our readers develop special connections to characters, series and publishers of the books we have in our library and classrooms. 

This happened last year in our 2nd grade classrooms when our teachers Staci Braun, Tracy Ferguson, Amanda Hetland and Megan Warwick started checking out several books in different early reader book series from our friends at Capstone. One day when I was in Amanda's room for a technology activity, her students told me how much they loved the Yasmin books and wondered if I had more. I was excited to see how the teachers and students were embracing the stories, characters and series. 

At the end of the school year, they asked to get together so we could brainstorm how we could take this concept and grow it into a new book club idea for this school year.  We thought it would be great to start with several of the kids favorites series like Yasmin, Sadiq, DC Super Heroes, Katie Woo, Pedro and more. 

So, over the summer, I took that list and picked four titles from each series.  I ordered five books of each of these titles from Capstone. You will find the New Capstone Book Sets for 2nd Grade Google Doc here. 

All of the book sets came in and we cataloged them as Capstone Book Sets in our Destiny Discover. 

Right now, these books are housed in the library as we wait for our brand new shelf that will go in the hallway down by the 2nd grade rooms. 

It will be called Our 2nd Grade Capstone Book Club Pop-Up Library!  It will be a place where our teachers can get sets of books from the different Capstone series to bring into their classroom to read in book clubs and for free reading. 

To start the school year, the teachers have been sharing the different series and books to get their students familiar with the characters. They will start the actual Capstone Book Clubs soon. 

To go along with the book clubs and to give our readers another place to connect to these characters and books, we also had the idea of using the Capstone Interactive eBooks we have to create Our Virtual Capstone Book Club Library! 

I created a Google Slide for six different characters to start.  Even though there were a lot more eBooks of some series like Katie Woo, I added 16 to this first round of choice boards and will make more as needed. 

For creating the choice board, I took a screen shot of each book cover and hyperlinked the link for the eBook to the cover as shown in the image above. 

The teachers have been sharing the choice boards in their Google Classrooms and also...

...displaying the print copies in their classrooms. I love how they are using them together. 

To make it easy for our students to access the eBooks with an iPad, 

I put together a poster for each choice board too.  I used QR Code Monkey to make the QR code. With this free site, you can include a tiny screen shot which makes it easy to know what each QR code is for. 

I laminated colored copies of the first 6 posters for each teacher to hang up in their classrooms. 

And now for one of my favorite parts!  

The teachers have also been making a black and white copy of each choice board.  The students use these as a way to keep track of every book they are reading within the Capstone series. 

As you can see, they are very proud of their reading achievements...

...and when I come into their classrooms, they can't wait to show me all of the books they have read. 

I love how the teachers have given them choice within this reading program.  

This means the world to our readers. It truly shows. 

Here are the choice boards that I have created so far.  You can make a copy and add links to the eBooks you have too. 

The Sadiq Choice Board

The Yasmin Choice Board

The Katie Woo Choice Board

The Boo Books Choice Board

The Pedro Choice Board 

The Mr. Grizley's Class Choice Board

And a special choice board that includes all six of these choice boards.  You will find this here to make a copy and changes of your own.  

As the year goes on, I will continue to create choice boards around the Capstone characters that our 2nd graders are reading like Camila, Sofia Martinez, Katie Woo's Neighborhood, The Amazing Adventures of DC Super Pets, The Amazing Adventures of Batman and Superman, Emma Every Day, Astrid and Apollo, My Furry Foster Family, Far Out Fairy Tales, Mr. Kazarian, Alien Librarian and more. 

In fact,  this page on the Capstone site for Early Reader Books is the perfect place to start when taking on a project around your early reader program.  

It outlines What Makes A Good Early Reader Book?, 

How Can Early Readers Build Lifelong Readers? and so much more.  You will find it here. 

This is just the beginning of something that will make a special and important impact on our readers.  It will bring a reading experience to every one of our students that they will never forget. 

And my hope is that this will be the start of something wonderful that will spread to the other grade levels too.  I can't wait to see what we do next with our Capstone Book Clubs! 

In the next blog post, I will share how we are going to be using Biblionasium with this program so our students can make virtual book shelves, write reviews, recommend books and more.