You've Been Virtually Book'd For Hour of Code Week, December 9-15, 2024....A Special Program and List I Use Within Our Destiny Discover & Library Each Month!

We are getting ready to celebrate Hour of Code Week, December 9-15, 2024. We will be collaborating on coding projects, bringing exciting activities to our students, and sharing lots of books and eBooks with coding topics and stories. 

In fact, one of the best parts of special days like this is sharing these books with all of our students and teachers within the library, classrooms and even at home. There are so many special ones that will inspire our kids, while bringing them ideas and fun. 

I brought together a list of 14 coding books that we have in our library collection. I also created a choice board with these books and linked them to our Destiny Discover so our students can find and read these special books from our library. 

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 books I included in the list.

Second, I went to our Destiny Discover and grabbed the links to each book. 

This is easy to do.  You just search for the book, click on the three little dots in the entry, 

and the drop down menu shown in the image above will appear. 

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

I love how I can also download the QR Code.  Isn't that cool? 

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 For Hour of Code Week, December 9-15, 2024 choice board will pop up. They can then click on each book cover to find them in our Destiny where they can read more about the book, find them in our library and even put them on reserve. 

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

If you want to make a copy to add your own Destiny Discover links from your library, click here. 

Our students and teachers will love these coding 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.

The NEW December PebbleGo & PebbleGo Monthly Holiday Calendar Is Here! Turn It Into An Interactive Research Choice Board For Your Students & Teachers!

 

The NEW December 2024 PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next Monthly Holiday Calendar that our friends at Capstone create for us each month is here! 

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 December 2024 Holidays Calendar. 

Last 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 December 2024 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, Christmas is on December 25, so they have the Christmas PebbleGo article featured. I went to PebbleGo and found the article about Christmas in PebbleGo.

 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.  

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.

I am excited to have the December 2024 PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next ready to go for the month. I hope you will find ways to use it with your students and teachers this month, and all throughout the school year too. 

Join Us This Thursday For Our NEW Demco Webinar, 5 Ways To Make Nonfiction a STAR in Your School! You Can Register Here, Friends.

                

We are excited to invite you to our upcoming Demco webinar this week on November 21, 2024 at 4:00pm CST.

This one is the third in our special series and is called 5 Ways To Make Nonfiction a STAR in Your School. 

As shared on the Demco site,

Join us to find out how to make nonfiction books a standout attraction in your learning spaces. Teachers, librarians, and educational professionals will walk away with impactful strategies that will help transform how students engage with nonfiction.

In this webinar, participants will discover:

1. 5 ways to make nonfiction a STAR in your library and classroom  
2. How to bring these ideas to your broader school community 
3. Shannon’s NEW nonfiction book selections

All webinars are archived and available for viewing within a week of the original presentation date. 

You can register today for our webinar, friends. We hope to see you there. 

Enter To Win New Tech For Your School From Follett Content!

                        

Our friends at Follett Content have a special giveaway! 

You can win new tech for your school when you spend $1500 or more by December 6, 2024. 

Two random customers will receive either a Dremel or Cricut product. How cool is that! 

You will find out all of the information about this Follett Content giveaway here. 

Get Your Deck Blue All Set Up to Use With Bluesky, Friends.

 

I was so excited to find Deck Blue tonight!  I am having such a wonderful time growing my network and connecting on Bluesky but really need a place to get things organized. 

The cool thing about Deck Blue is that you can set up all kinds of columns from You, Notifications, Lists, Custom Feeds, and more. 

Just go to deck.blue with your Bluesky username and an App Password. I found this at Settings > App Passwords. 

It's so quick to set up and has been super helpful too!

Creating Our Very Own Turkey Trouble Pixel Art and PebbleGo Create Story! You Can Do This Activity With Your Kids Too, Friends.

                  

I have a fun project to share that you can do with your students this week as we get ready to celebrate Thanksgiving.  This one includes one of my favorite holiday books, Turkey Trouble. I created this choice board to help students work through each step of the project. 

In this project, students will be listening to Turkey Trouble from the read aloud on Storyline Online that you can find here.  

They can also learn more about turkeys in the PebbleGo article about Wild Turkeys. It will also be helpful for students to use the pictures of the turkeys as reference when creating their turkey in the Pixel Art site. 

After the story, they will go to the StickTogether Pixel Art site to create their turkey in a disguise, like the one above. 

For this project, students will Generate a PDF from the Pixel Art site and save it to their device. 

Please note that with the new Pixel Art upgrade, teachers and librarians can also share their dashboard link and have the pixel art creations come to their account too.  You can sign up for the new free Pixel Art site here.

It is up to you how you save the images. 

We are going to use PebbleGo Create to create our Turkey Trouble book.  Since our students are saving their pixel art on their computer, it will be easy for them to upload into PebbleGo Create to write their page of our story. 

I can bring these together for a digital story and also print the pages to create a physical class book. 

Here is a copy of the choice board I will be using with the students.  You can add your own link to the PebbleGo turkey article and then share this with your students.  Remember to share the Published link. 

I can't wait to share this project with our students. Let me know if you do it with your students.  We can share our Turkey Trouble stories, friends. 

Celebrate Native American Month With These Capstone Books and The PebbleGo Next Indigenous Peoples' History Module.

 

November is Native American Heritage Month. We celebrate and learn about this special month within our library, classrooms and throughout the school community in a variety of ways. 

Our friends at Capstone have brought together lots of amazing resources that I love to share and use. They have several fiction and nonfiction books, and the PebbleGo Next module, Indigenous Peoples' History. 

On Capstone's Native American Heritage Month site here, they share more information about these resources. 

And don't miss the fun Educator Resources and Downloadables too. 

The Recording and Resources Are Here, Friends For My NEW Follett Content Webinar About Online Book eFairs!

 

This week was my new webinar with Follett Content, Adventures Await For Our Readers With Online Book eFairs. 

The recording and resources are here, friends. You can find it here.

I Would Love To Connect With You On Bluesky, Friends.

 

Friends, I would love to connect with you on Bluesky.  

This week, I have started connecting and building an amazing network on this new platform where so many are making connections too. 

You will find me at @shannonmmiller.bsky.social and I can't wait to follow you back.  Let's create something great for everyone. 

And a special thanks to Karly Moura for creating the Bluesky Canva template I used in this post. You can find it here too.

The Kindness Booth Book, Activity Kit, and Kindness Card From Our Friends At Capstone For World Kindness Day On November 13, 2024.

 

It's World Kindness Day this week on November 13, 2024. The theme of World Kindness Day 2024 is to make kindness the norm, rather than the exception. The day is a global celebration that encourages people to perform acts of kindness and promote a culture of compassion and generosity

I have the perfect book and activities for you to share with your students and community, friends.

It's called The Kindness Booth from our friends at Capstone, by Laura K. Murray, and Illustrated by Andrea Boatta. 

I just LOVE the story and message in The Kindness Booth. As shared online, 

When Mya wakes up to a gloomy day, her grandpa asks her how she could make the day brighter. His simple question puts Mya into motion, and together with her little brother, Oliver, and neighbor Addie, she opens the Kindness Booth. Their plan is to spread some sunshine to the neighbors in her apartment complex by helping them throughout the day. But what happens when the booth gets rained out?

We have The Kindness Book, and also the Capstone Interactive eBook that all of the kids and teachers can read and share this week.  They can even read it with their families at home. 

In addition to the questions and resources in the back of the book, there is also....

...the wonderful The Kindness Booth Activity Kit filled with meaningful and fun activities.  

You will find it here.

And look at the Kindness Cards.  I will share these with our teachers as a special activity to do in their classrooms this week. 

You will find The Kindness Booth in all formats here on capstonepub.com.

Enjoy celebrating Kindness Day, friends. Thank you for being so kind too. 

The Recording and Slides Are Here For Our Latest Demco Webinar, Igniting a Passion For Nonfiction In Our Readers!

 

On October 29, Brianna and I hosted a special webinar with our friends from Demco, Igniting a Passion For Nonfiction In Our Readers. 

The recording, slides and resources are now available and you can find them here. 

Also, don't forget to register for our next webinar, 5 Ways To Make Nonfiction a STAR in Your School coming up on November 21, 2024 at 4:00pm CST. You can register here.

We hope to see you there, friends. 

You've Been Virtually Book'd With Books and Resources To Honor Native American Heritage Month

 

November is Native American Heritage Month. 

As shared on the US Department of the Interior Indian Affairs site, 

National Native American Heritage Month is celebrated each year in November. It is a time to celebrate the traditions, languages and stories of Native American, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, and affiliated Island communities and ensure their rich histories and contributions continue to thrive with each passing generation. This November and every month, we celebrate the culture and heritage of these remarkable Americans who deeply enrich the quality and character of our Nation. We celebrate Indian Country with its remarkable diversity of American Indian and Alaska Native cultures and peoples while remembering and honoring our veterans who have sacrificed so much to defend our Nation.

You will also find wonderful Native American Heritage Month resources here from Library of Congress and others. 

Our friends at Follett Content have also put together an amazing Titlewave® list with over 1000 books to introduce readers to Indigenous peoples and their contemporary descendants. There are so many I added to my Titlewave list full of books for Native American Heritage Month. I couldn't wait to share a few of my favorites with you on this choice board. 

You will find the entire list here where you can add explore and add titles to your own Titlewave list for your library and readers.