Bubble Gum Day is Coming!

If you haven't heard of Bubble Gum Day, I am So excited to be able to share this...

The Author Ruth Spiro created Bubble Gum Day in 2006 as a way for schools and organizations to raise money for a cause of their choice! So we immediately wanted to get involved and have our own Bubble Gum Day, but we wanted Bubble Gum Day to be a way to raise funds for our school library. Our Bubble Gum Day is actually going to last 6 days, so that each class will have their "Bubble Gum Day in the Library"on the day and time their class would have Library.
This year Ruth has offered to skype with us, so this Friday we will have our first author skype with Ruth Spiro to kick-off our Bubble Gum Day in the Library! This skype session will be recorded and then shown to each class as they visit the library for their Bubble Gum Day.
In addition to purchasing Ruth Spiro's Book

I also purchased additional books about Bubble Gum for the students to read!

Pop! The Invention of Bubble Gum 

The Gum Chewing Rattler

Bubble Gum, Bubble Gum

Bubblemania, the Chewy History of Bubble Gum

Our school's Bubble Gum Day is raising money to purchase e-books to be used by our students! e-books are very new to our school and after doing a lot of research on e-books, we have decided to get started with MackinVIA, so this year for Bubble Gum Day we are SMACKIN for MACKIN!

Check back here for additional info and pictures of our Bubble Gum Day!

We have read our second FRA book this week. Another true story, this time about a dog and cat who developed an unlikely friendship and were able to survive Hurricane Katrina and the difficult months that followed. Two Bobbies by  Kirby Larson and Mary Nethery is a story that brought tears to my eyes  the first time I read it. Two Bobbies has it's own website, take a look! The kids have really enjoyed reading this book, we had a wall map out so that they could see where New Orleans, Utah, and Oregon are. The Two Bobbies now reside in southern Oregon. There is plenty of vocabulary to discuss as well.
Here is the FRA glogster with additional activities for Two Bobbies.

Symbaloo arrived today!

If you don't know about Symbaloo, pay very close attention!

Symbaloo is  visual bookmarking of websites. You sign up for free with Symbaloo and from there you can create your own webmix, which is  a page of your favorite websites. You can title your webmix to reflect the type of websites. As a Teacher Librarian, today was the day we set Symbaloo as our homepage on all of our laptops in the Media Center. Here is a picture of our homepage.

My friend Shannon Miller  shared Symbaloo with me, you can read her posts here.

Symbaloo has already saved my assistant and I a lot of time by not needing to find the different websites students are visiting. It is extremely easy for our kindergartners to use! Also, if your school is like mine, having the IT department re-image computers is a huge process and having the Symbaloo as our homepage, I can now change what websites are up and visible for our students to chose from with out needing the image changed!


AND, you can search and add webmixes that other people have created! I love sharing

A New Year to Blog

2013 is my year to BLOG!!! My goal is to submit one post to this blog each week! Week one is done!

This week in the Library my K-2 grade students have been learning about a penguin named Pierre by reading the book Pierre the Penguin A True Story written by Jean Marzollo and illustrated by Laura Regan. For the state of Florida, this book has been nominated as a Florida Reading Association book, which means it could be the state of Florida's favorite picture book for 2013!
I visited the F.R.A. website and found a glogster with additional activities to do along with this book. FRA Children's Book Award Extension Activities
The best part is being able to watch the Penguins LIVE! California Academy of Sciences Penguin Cam

I brought is a wetsuit for the students to feel neoprene, and they loved it, several thought it was smelly! :)
I hope you enjoy this true story as much as our kids did!