Look How You Can Turn The June 2023 PebbleGo & PebbleGo Next Monthly Holiday Calendar Into An Interactive Research Choice Board For Your Students & Teachers!

Our friends at Capstone create these super fun PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next Holiday Calendars each month. 

In this post, I share more about the PebbleGo Monthly Calendars. 

I love making paper copies of these to share with our teachers and kids. 

They hang them up in their classrooms and hang them in our library too. I also share them online through social media and as an image in Google Classroom or Seesaw. 

The teachers even use the PebbleGo Calendars for mini research opportunities throughout each week. The students use PebbleGo Create to share what they learn throughout the month with the calendars. 

Here is the PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next June 2023 Holidays Calendar. 

Earlier this year, when I was sharing the calendars with teachers and students, I thought....Hey, this would be really fun in a choice board! 

So, I opened up a Google Slide, uploaded the PebbleGo June 2023 Holidays Calendar, and added a little chalk board with text over the top.  

Then I went through the calendar and found every special day in PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next.  

For example, Best Friends Day is June 8. The PebbleGo article about Making New Friends is featured on this day. 

I went to PebbleGo and found the article. I grabbed the link, as shown in the image above. 

I took that link and added a linked text box around each special date. 

Now, when the kids click on a holiday, it will take them directly to that PebbleGo article.  

If you want to use the template to create your own, you will find the Google Slide here to make a copy and add links to the PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next articles. 

And to make it a choice board, just Publish to the web, as shown in this image above. 

You will share that Published Link with your students. 

Since we are into the summer holiday (or almost into the summer holiday for a lot of you), I plan to continue to share the PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next Holiday Calendars with my students all summer long. I will share them on our library social and in our summer reading newsletter too. 

I love sharing these interactive PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next Holiday Calendars with our students and teachers. They love learning all about these special days that are highlighted each month too.

Join Storyvoice For 4 Very Special LOVE Author Events To Celebrate The End of the School Year!

 

This week, you can join Storyvoice for their final live author events of the school year!  

They have four very special love events with four amazing authors on May 25 and May 26. 

You can find them all here. 

Friends, There Is A NEW StickTogether Sticker Poster Of "The Library Voice" With A Secret Message and Special Note From Me!

 

I am excited to share a special new StickTogether Sticker Poster very dear to my heart. 

It's The Library Voice, created from the amazing art work my friend and artist, Susan Reagan, created for my blog, stickers, business cards and note cards. 

While brainstorming with Sylvia and Brianna from StickTogether one day, we talked about the idea of bringing The Library Voice to life in a Sticker Poster. Not only did we include the art work, 

I also wrote a personal message that is included at the bottom of the Sticker Poster.  

And to make it even better, there is a secret message included within the Sticker Poster too. 

I love how the Sticker Poster turned out as it includes 20 different colors within the beautiful pixel art image. 

You will find The Library Voice Sticker Poster here, friends. 

I hope you and your students, teachers and community enjoy The Library Voice too. 

Join Joe Sanfelippo and Myself For The 3rd Annual Future Ready Bookclub Starting June 6th...Lead From Where You Are; Building Intention, Connection and Direction in Our Schools

                    

Friends, I am so excited for the 3rd annual Future Ready Summer Book Club!  This summer, Joe Sanfelippo will join us as we read his best selling book, Lead from Where You Are: building Intention, Connection and Direction in Our Schools. 

As shared on our Future Ready Summer Book Club page...

 This summer we will be featuring, Lead from Where You Are: Building Intention, Connection and Direction in Our Schools, by Joe Sanfelippo, author and Superintendent, Fall Creek School District (WI), (@joe_sanfelippo).

 

A little bit about the book - Lead from Where You Are offers a down-to-earth, implementable approach to rethinking how we build leadership and community in schools. Dr. Joe Sanfelippo, a veteran principal and superintendent, argues that our focus must be on growing leadership potential all across the community, from students to teachers to staff. We can do this by reflecting on how we build a sense of intention together, how we connect with each other, and how we direct those we lead with compassion and affirmation. Sanfelippo’s frank discussion of the highs and lows of leadership will help new principals and superintendents feel prepared, while also providing useful methods and sound counsel.

Here’s how it will work.

• June 6 - Chapter 1
• June 13 – Chapter 2
• June 20 – Chapter 3
• June 27- Chapter 4

• July 5 – Chapter 5

• July 11 -Chapters 6 and 7

• July 19 at 2:00pm ET-  Live discussion

Register and order an autographed copy of the book: futureready.link/summer23

We hope you can join us this summer friends. It is going to be an awesome way to continue our learning and growth throughout the summer. 

New Resources With FREE, Fun and Engaging Content From Our Friends From Capstone On Their NEW Summer Inspiration Site!

 

I am excited to share these new resources for SUMMER INSPIRATION from our friends at Capstone. 

As they shared on Twitter, 

Looking for summer inspo?

We created this new page so your students can access a ton of free, fun, & engaging content that will encourage their love of learning + boost their use of #CapstoneConnect, #PebbleGo, or #CapstoneInteractive this summer.

I couldn't wait to check it out and look what I found!

On the Inspire Reading All Summer Long page, there are...

so many wonderful Extra Summer Resources including Guided Activities, Video Tutorials, Letters Home, Customizable Bookmarks, Summer Calendars and My Choice Boards for the Capstone Virtual Summer Camp Adventure. 

Oh, and check out this super neat Summer Reading Log!  

There is a place where you can learn more about the different tools in Capstone Connect and even...

....an Example of what you can do to enhance learning and creativity using these tools together around one learning topic. 

This site is loaded with so many awesome things to check out this summer. You will find the site here and can contact your local rep at REP@capstonepub.com to find out more. 

You've Been Virtually Book'd With These Summer Reading Books....A Special Program and List I Use Within Our Destiny Discover & Library For Summer Reading!

                

Summer is almost here and it is time for summer reading! 

We get out of school in three days so I have been spending a lot of time getting ready and finding ways to best support our readers in meaningful, helpful and personalized ways. 

When I plan summer reading for our students, I think about how successful we have been at including not only wonderful books, but also eBooks, audio books and other digital resources within our library summer reading program.  

One thing I did was put together a list and choice board filled with 14 new and favorite print and eBooks from our Destiny Discover that will be perfect for summer reading. 

And being in a preschool to 12th grade school, I made sure to include something special for all of our readers.  

With these eBooks, I put together a choice board. 

Let me show you how I set up this choice board for my school community. 

First, I created the choice board in a Google Slide.  I added the covers of the 14 eBooks I included in this choice board. 

Second, I went to our Destiny Discover and...

...grabbed the links to each eBook.  

This is easy to do.  You just search for the eBook, click on the three little dots next to Open, and this drop down menu will appear. 

Click on Share and the link to the book will pop up. That is the url to share in the choice boards. 

Take the copied link and add it to the book cover.  

When every book cover is linked, you are ready to share the choice board. 

Go to File and down to Publish to the web.  

This will give you a link to share with the students and teachers.  

When they click on that published link, the You've Been Virtually Book'd With These Picture Books will pop up and all of the eBooks can be read from there. 

I am excited about this list of 14 special new eBooks I put together in Titlewave.  In this choice board, you can click on any book cover to view and find the full book list from Titlewave there too. 

Our students will love these summer reading books that are part of our You've Been Virtually Book'd program.  And I love how we can keep this program going all year long!  It brings so much to our readers each and every month.

Here's A Special End-of-the-Year Project Our Kids Loved Creating Using Pixel Art, Animated Drawings and Canva....All FREE Digital Tools!

 

I love it when the teachers and I collaborate and work on fun end-of-the-year projects together.  The last few weeks I worked with our kindergarten teachers to help our students create a special project using Pixel Art, Animated Drawings and Canva.  

Let me tell you what we did to create their animated story of each class. 

First, we had the students create a full body self portrait of themselves using StickTogether's Pixel Art site. You will find it here. 

With the Pixel Art site, students can create using 300 pixels with the different colors shown above.   

The first thing we had them do is sketch out their self portrait and use their Crayons to color in the pixels on a sheet that I just screen shot from the Pixel Art site. This is super helpful for our little ones as they set off to design on the actual site. 

Our kindergarteners have iPads, so I created a QR code, linked to the Pixel Art site, for them to scan.  

They used their sketch to guide them.  

Take a look at how creative and amazing their pixel art is!  

I love how unique their creations are using this site. 

Next, I took their Pixel Art creations and uploaded them into Animated Drawings. 

It is very easy to use. Just take a screen shot of their pixel art and upload into Animated Drawings. 

It will then have you fix any pieces that aren't highlighted with the pen and eraser. 

After that, it will put in joint points that you can move around if you need to in order to make the character look like it is moving. 

Once you get the joints in, you press next and it lets you Add Animation to your character.  There are different ones including Dance, Funny, Jumping or Walking. You can pick. 

After the character is animated,  click on the Download button under Share. 

This will download the Animated Drawing onto your computer. 

For this project, we used the Video feature in Canva to bring it all together. 

It's so much fun to use Canva in creating videos. 

To start, the teachers created a video and shared it with me so we could collaborate together. 

They asked the students what their favorite memory was from the year.  The teachers then found an image and added it to the slides with their name,.  It's fun to use the Record Yourself  button to add a video. 

Next, I came in and uploaded the...

...Video Files.  You can see all of the little Animated Drawing videos I uploaded. 

Once the correct video was added to the slide, I clicked on Background Remover and it magically takes out the entire background.  They did the same thing to the student talking video too. 

You can see on Fiona's slide how her....

pixel art drawing came to life in Pixel Art, Animated Drawings and Canva! 

And check out Loxley and....

...Olivia's too! 

You will find Our Favorite Activities From The Year From Mrs. Crutchley's Kindergarten here. 

What a neat memory for the kids to share with their families.