Join Us For A GHO Tomorrow at 8:15am CST As We Work With 2nd Grade Authors & Michael Dahl On Our Library Celebrations Book!

I am so excited for the Celebrations Around The World Global Project taking place right now!  

It is part of Harmony Projects, Global Connections with Cantata Learning....and our second amazing project we have done with students, teachers, librarians and others around the world.  

In the Celebrations Around The World Global Project, we invite everyone to join and share stories, songs, recipes, photographs, decorations, art, poetry and other ideas that showcase how students celebrate in their communities and cultures. 

I wanted to do a special celebrations project with my 2nd grade friends and teachers at Van Meter. 

We have been sharing and celebrating a very special new book from Cantata Learning Happy Birthday Feliz Cumpleanos.  This book is super special as it combines the traditional happy birthday song in English, Spanish, and American Sign Language....and is just in time for Capstone's 25th Birthday!  

We even Skyped with Kat Coughlan from Cantata Learning and she showed us Happy Birthday before it hit the shelves. 

It was a lot of fun learning the Spanish and Sign Language for Happy Birthday too!  

You can read all about our Skype visit here. 

And you can listen to Happy Birthday...Feliz Cumpleanos from the Cantata Learning website and find out more about it here. 

After brainstorming with Kim James, the teacher librarian, and talking about the new library and school renovations taking place at Van Meter, we thought it would be great fun to write a song with Tracy Ferguson and her 2nd graders celebrating school libraries.

I talked with my friends at Cantata and we decided it would be an AMAZING project to do together with our friends. 

And it is a fit perfect with some BIG news I have!  

I am excited to share that I am currently working on a book project with Cantata Learning!  I will be collaborating on a series of eight books and songs about all things to do with school libraries which will be published in the fall of 2017.  

I always wanted to write children's books so this is a dream come true.  And to have them be about all we do in our school libraries...that is the best of all! 

The first step was to have a conversation with the 2nd graders and gather ideas from them about school libraries.

I created a Padlet for them to add ideas and collaborate together.

I loved reading the ideas they were thinking about and sharing....and using Padlet was such a terrific place for us to collaborate back and forth with the students and teachers.

We brought Marsha Fries, the elementary music teacher at Van Meter, into our collaboration.

And to make it even more exciting, Michael Dahl, who is a children's author at Capstone Publishing, and Liz Draper, who is the music director at Cantata Learning, joined the project.

Michael is going to help us write the words and Liz is going to help us put it to music.
                 
Our second step was to bring our team together in a Google Hangout.

Tracy and her 2nd graders, Kim, and Marsha were in Iowa... Capstone author, Beth Brezenoff, Kat, Liz and myself were in Minnesota and Colorado.

We recorded our Google Hangout and you can watch it at link above.

The 2nd graders were very happy to share their ideas and talk to Kat and Beth about the writing process.  I could really see their wheels turning when Liz talked to them about putting words to music.

Liz gave them the task of taking their ideas and putting them into a chorus for our library song.

They got right to work after our GHO and posted this idea above on the Padlet.

Tracy also had one of our little friends share it in a video.  I love what they have created so far.  

Tomorrow morning we will be meeting again in a Google Hangout. This time, Michael will work with the kids on looking closely at the song lyrics they have created and what they can do to make them even better. 

He shared Five Points For Writing Song Lyrics....

and we wanted to share them here with you too.  

These will be helpful as you and your students work on writing your special celebration songs too.  

Our Google Hangout tomorrow morning at 8:15am CST will be live and you can join it by clicking on this link.  

And don't forget that we would love for all of you to join our Celebrations Around The World Global Project too!  

You can click here to sign up....I will be putting these projects together in a FlipSnack eBook like the one we created for our Winter Around the World Project in December.