The Library Voice

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Kicking Off Children's Book Week "Month" With Collaborative "Our Favorite Book" HaikuDecks Created By Our Kindergarteners and 4th Graders

With Children's Book Week from CBW coming up the week of May 12-18, 2014, we have decided to celebrate all month long in the Van Meter Library with all kinds of creative, collaborative, and engaging activities.

Today we kicked off the month by bringing the kindergarteners and fourth graders together to share their favorite books using one of our favorite digital tools on their iPads.

Everyone grabbed a partner and went on a search for eight to ten of their favorite books.

As they were finding their favorite books, they were also using the HaikuDeck app on their iPads to create a little presentation to share with their friends and others to celebrate Children Book Week "Month".

Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app

We just love how the HaikuDeck's are turning out and can't wait to share even more next week as the other groups finish and publish them too.

Happy Children's Book Week "Month" to all of you.....We hope everyone has a special time celebrating within your libraries, schools, and towns too.

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Our Dear Friend, Robert Forbes, Helps Us End Poetry Month On A Very Special Note

As we were leaving April and Poetry Month yesterday, we had a very special friend help us celebrate poetry one more time.

Robert Forbes, who just happens to be my favorite poet, stopped by to share and talk poetry with our second graders. As always, it was such great fun.

We all loved listening to Robert read from his books Beastly Feasts and Let's Have A Bite.

It is such a special treat to listen as he reads his poems and just as much to see the wonderful illustrations by Ronald Searle that accompany each poem.

The kids also had a chance to ask Robert lots of questions. They had so many really awesome ones this time.

Porter asked him,

Did you play sports when you were young?

And Charli wondered,

Do you ever come to a point where you have trouble writing?

Thank you my friend for Skyping with us and bringing so much happiness to our library and school. Your poems and books will always be our favorites.

Please check out Robert Forbes website for more information.

Our Fourth Graders Using HaikuDeck & Photos To Create Poetry With Our Friend And Poet, Laura Purdie Salas

As we get to the end of Poetry Month, I thought it would be fun to have a few more connections this week for our students to poets, poetry, and creating poems of their own.

Yesterday, the fourth graders connected with the poet Laura Purdie Salas. Laura and I have become friends through Twitter and Facebook. We were super excited to make this connection with her and the kids at Van Meter.

One of her books that we have in the library is Picture Yourself Writing Poetry....Using Photos To Inspire Writing. With the fourth graders all having their own iPads, I thought this would be a perfect way to connect and create something cool together.

Laura first spoke to them about using photographs to inspire writing. She brainstormed with them and showed them how to write a poem with different visualizing techniques.

For this project, I thought it would be fun for them to use the HaikuDeck app. HaikuDeck is one that is new to the fourth graders and one I wanted them to use before the end of the year. They would be able to put together words and images into a presentation really quick and easily. It is also easy to share these with others.

We had the students get with a partner and gave them the task of either taking a photograph or finding one within HaikuDeck. They then wrote a poem to go with the image they choose.

We gave them 15 minutes to create and told them we would come back together with Laura on Skype when they were ready to share.

All of the groups shared their HaikuDeck Poetry.....They did an amazing job!

It was so much fun to listen and see what they created using photographs.

The fourth graders published their HaikuDeck's and were excited to add this digital tool to their own "tool box" of things to use on future projects.