Be Kind

Kindness and Collaboration

With this week centered around kindness each grade level worked on a lesson which incorporated an element of kindness or collaboration. Kinder discovered that being nice to someone, even if they are not nice to you can create an impact. First grade learned about Enemy Pie and developed recipes to make friendships instead of enemies. Second grade learned of one man's dream and kindness to entertain others and began their planning for sharing the joys of Thanksgiving through their very own Balloons over Bandera parade. Third grade began their designs for our Traveling Mural Project. Here we are sharing with 9 other schools, throughout the US, our school motto and our images that represent our town and our school. In return we will be receiving pieces to create a mural, from those same schools, in our hallway. While fourth and fifth graders worked on being helpful to one another and to themselves by learning our library's catalog system, no longer will they have to wait on other to help them find books they are looking for! 

Kinder

First Grade

Second Grade

Third Grade

2018 Project 

Fourth and Fifth Grade

Commanders of Coding

Mrs. Rardin and I are so excited about our recent grant winning! The coding bots have been ordered and are steadily making their way in to the library! Prior to Christmas break all students on Alkek's campus will learn to use the different bots and how to code with them through various means. At the beginning of the new semester we will be opening our coding club to students for participation and practice in coding before school several days and after school once a week. We look forward to all of the cool activities and the opportunity for our students to explore the use of computational thinking and computer coding. With these experiences our students will be better prepared to make elective choices at the middle school and high school level that could lead to their future careers in such technologies. 

Book Fair Bonanza

Our Scholastic Book Fair was an Arctic Blast!

This was my first book fair to run, and I will say that I am looking forward the future of our book fairs! We had an eventful start up with our truck of goodies arriving in the rain just before Halloween. Set up took the entire day with continued additions throughout the week to make the scenery just right for our arctic theme. The students then spent the remainder of the week coming in with their classes to learn the expectations of the upcoming week and got to make their wish lists in hopes to be able to buy a book from the many to choose from. Seeing the excitement on the faces of the students filled with anticipation of  the shopping days to come made all of the hard work well worth it! 

Tuesday night brought Family Math and Reading Night where families gathered to enjoy Alkek's world famous hot dogs and treats, then venture off to the classroom hallways to enjoy math and reading activities. Families were caught laughing and having a great time! Final destination for most was the book fair, where families worked together to pick out reading material to build their own home libraries. Many also tended to the wish lists of the teachers, adding to their classroom collections as well.

I want to send out a huge thank you to all of the PTO and parent volunteers for helping make this all possible! Without you it would be impossible to keep the library open for student checkouts and for book fair purchases. 

Book Fair Fairy Visits

The ever mysterious Book Fair Fairy also paid a visit, delivering some books to students during this week. We appreciate her helping out some of our students who couldn't afford to buy books at this time from the fair. I'm sure she will return with the next fair in February!

The Grade Finale!!!

Thanks to all for buying books and items at the book fair. Our grand total in sales was over $10,000 which turns into approximately $4,000 in Scholastic Dollars for us to purchase books and library items! I'm so excited to be able to fill some of our students' wish lists of reading material for the library!!!   

Alphabet and Call Numbers...How the Library Works

This past week our library was all a buzz about the alphabet and call numbers. Our students worked on these skills to help them become more proficient in their resource location abilities. Sometimes students don't understand that learning the alphabet proficiently leads to practical applications throughout their school years and beyond.

PreK and PPCD

This week we sang the alphabet song with Sesame Street and read Alphabatics by Suse McDonald. Students then completed a scavenger hunt among themselves to find either the capital or lowercase letter that match the one they were given. It was great to see our littles working together and helping each other to find their matches! 

Kinder

We read Alphabatics by Suse McDonald and closely watched our beloved alphabet letters change into images that represented each letter. The students increasingly became observant and aware of the growing changes the further we read and discussed the illustrations. Kinder students worked with their alphabet and practiced identifying letter that came before and after given letters. 

First Grade

First grade students enjoyed listening to Alpha Oops and discussing the possibilities of life with an alphabet that was in a different order than what we know. Students then worked with partners to collaboratively place words in alphabetical order by the first letter. 

Second Grade

The week our second graders completed their Creepy Carrot fence from their planned construction of the previous week. We had a great number of successes and some failures; however, we have learned that failures are a part of the STEM process as with any other scientific process. Students reflected on what worked, what didn't, and what they thought they could do differently to improve their designs.  All had a good time and experienced computational thinking at its fullest!  

Third Grade

Third grade was introduced to the Traveling Mural Project by Shannon Miller a librarian for Van Meter Schools  in Iowa. This project was inspired by Maybe Something Beautiful, a story about how one neighborhood went from drab to fab with mural paintings led by Raphael Lopez and his wife. Our students will be creating a 10 ft mural to represent Alkek's school motto: Be Kind - Work Hard - Dream Big. Then the mural will be cut into 1 ft sections and mailed off to 9 other schools across the country; in return we will be receiving 9 pieces back. We will put these pieces together and display them in the hallway. This is our way of making a world wide impact!  

 

Fourth and Fifth Grade

Students completed their library scavenger hunt by practicing the usage of call numbers to assist them in locating resources within the library. Not only did they get the chance to practice the use of call numbers, but they found many books they did not know our library housed. 

Book Fair is Coming!

This week students are previewing the book fair and all it has to offer! Our arctic reading igloo is also complete! Thank you for all of the jug donations that made it possible!