elementary-school-student-work

Come on Down to the Dewey Cafe!

Tue, 16 Dec 2014 10:32:18 +0100

This week in the Library, 4th grade students spent time in the Dewey Cafe -- where they applied their knowledge of the Dewey Decimal System and of how the library works by using a "cafe" setting. Students dressed as either a customer who ordered a "meal" of books, a waiter who took the customer's order and searched for/picked it up from the shelves, or a chef who "cooked" the order by searching in our Destiny Quest library catalog. All students inquired into and learned a little bit more about how to independently locate resources in the library and looked dashing in the process!

Grade 2 Caldecott Winners

Tue, 16 Dec 2014 10:30:50 +0100

Caldecott Medal:

An award given to the illustrator with the best illustrations in a children’s book each year.

ISB Illustration Award:

After learning about the Caldecott Medal during their unit about How We Express Ourselves with Art, grade 2 students evaluated at least four Caldecott Medal or Caldecott Honor picture books. Using a ballot, they chose which picture book to give their personal ISB Illustration Award. Enjoy looking at the 2^nd grade winners for best picture book art!

** When books win awards, the award appears in Destiny when you search! The 2014 ISB Illustration Awards now also appear in our library catalog! Check it out! **

Week of Code!

Tue, 16 Dec 2014 10:25:00 +0100

Week of Code

This week the ISB joined 5 million students around the world in celebrating Computer Science Education Week by taking part in their Hour of Code initiative. Hour of Code promotes students learning coding basics in fun ways for 1 hour during the past week. Why learn coding? Computer coding and programming are a skill necessary to creating new technologies, to innovation in our increasingly technological world, and are the basis of being able to work in the 1.4 million computing jobs available on today's job market. This number will only increase and having coding skills will be an important skill in every field.

Coding also teaches students the skills of problem solving, creativity, critical thinking, mathematical patterns, and collaboration.

Upper School students were invited to the library during lunches to try their hand at computer coding using Hour of Code's free tutorials. (https://code.org/learn)

3rd grade students coded in the library in connection to their unit on Poetry -- the language of computer programming is often called poetic in it's ability to allow humans to express themselves through computers and other technologies. They used the coding tutorial featuring Disney's Frozen - continue this activity with your 3rd grader by clicking here.

2nd grade students also coded in the library in connection to their unit on Communication; at it's base coding is simply the language in which programmers communicate with the computer to tell it what to do and in turn makes new types of communication possible (Skype, email, smart phones, etc. all run on code). 2nd graders used the coding tutorial LightBot - continue this activity with your 2nd grader by clicking here.

Overall, students collaborated, learned why coding is important in our daily lives in the 21st century, and were hopefully inspired to continue on their own. For more information or to learn coding alongside your student go to www.code.org/learn.

Happy coding!

Author David J. Smith Visits !

Tue, 16 Dec 2014 10:26:08 +0100

This week author, David Smith, joined us at ISB! On Monday, Mr. Smith talked about his book If the World Were a Village and the interesting, unanswerable questions about the world with the Lower School. How many countries are there? How many people in the world? We explored the idea that no one really knows! With the Upper School, Mr. Smith gave a talk on Borders and Boundaries in our world -- about how they should be a simple concept, but in reality are much more complicated than that!

On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, Mr. Smith went to the American Corners in Novi Sad, Nis, and Belgrade -- a special thanks to the US Embassy Speaker program for bringing Mr. Smith to ISB and to Serbia!

On Friday, Mr. Smith was back at ISB again to visit every grade at the Lower School and connect his books to the students' Units of Inquiry. It was so wonderful to see how If the World Were a Village could connect to what everyone in the whole school was learning!

Finally, the library ended this busy week with the ISB Book Sale! Mr. Smith was on hand to sign books, teachers read their favorite picture book in the reading corner, and hopefully you joined us to find some great new books!

Happy Reading!

Ms. Goetz

Grade 2 Extreme (Food) Weather

Tue, 16 Dec 2014 10:15:58 +0100

Juice Rain Floods Town! Macaroni Hail Crushes School!

2nd grade read the picture book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barnett and then used their knowledge from the weather unit, combined it with their imagination and became weather reporters for the Chewandswallow Chronicle newspaper! Students spent time brainstorming what types of real weather could be substituted by food, what disasters might stem from that, and then wrote a newspaper article about the food weather disaster! Students shared their article with the class (pictures below).

Articles and pictures are on display at the Lower School Library - come check them out!

Grade 3 Google Earth

Tue, 16 Dec 2014 10:13:19 +0100

Let's Go Places!
3rd grade furthered their work, with the How the World Works unit, in the Library by using Google Earth. Students were asked to "go" different places on earth and explore the landforms found there. As they worked, exclamations of, "I'm in Sweden!," "I'm at the South Sea!," "Where are you? I'm on top of Mount Everest!," or "Help, I'm lost in the hills of Ohio!" were heard.

Grade 5 Bad Apples!

Tue, 16 Dec 2014 10:12:19 +0100

Research Wisely!

The past few weeks, 5th grade students have been researching famous people for their biography project. In library class, students looked at what sources of information were good or not-so-good by evaluating them using a checklist and the "Bad Apple" activity. Students are now researching away using only trustworthy sources; including the library's subscription to the National Geographic database[username: ISB; password: library].

Grade 5 Research Unit

Tue, 16 Dec 2014 10:04:11 +0100

Grade 5 is starting their Library Research Unit in preparation for the PYP Exhibition!

In order to be prepared for the work with the exhibition this year, 5th grade will be honing their research skills. they started by taking the TRAILS Information Skills test to see what they already knew about researching. Then, we will look at what skills we need to work on based on the test. Here, in the picture below, you can see 5th graders having a Silent Conversation about what they think it means to be a researcher, what is a sources, how to avoid plagiarism, and ultimately, is knowledge really power?

After this provocation, students will spend the next month working on finding good, reliable sources, taking notes from those sources, and then citing them. We will discuss plagiarism, copyright, the anonymity of the internet and much more!

Exhibition here we come!