Happy Halloween

Today we could dress up as a book character for school - I had a hard time deciding and finally decided at about 3pm yesterday - which explains why I could not find pink pants for my outfit.

Can you guess the book??

Just wish I had more time last night to make pink cupcakes to share at school today - maybe next year!

Today our school systems cable channel is coming here to film a segment for a series they have called the Author in You with local Atlanta author ( and my friend) Laurel Snyder - they usually put up a link to the show once it is live, so I will be sure to add it to the blog. Check out some shows that they have done in the past here.

Boo Bubbles, Ghost Stories and 40

I love October - for many reasons - post season baseball (ok, that one not so much this year), cooler weather, leaves changing color, pumpkins, my birthday and Halloween! Last year I found a kit to make BOO bubbles on Steve Spangler Science (my favorite science shop!) and the kids loved it so much I decided to do it again this year. I forget what I read last year, but this year I am reading the book The Ghost Eye Tree by Bill Martin jr. and John Archambault. The worst thing about this story time - having to go buy dry ice every morning before school (and it gets expensive!)

My new favorite photo sharing slide program - whrrl is now blocked in my school (knew it was too good to last) so I tried slide share - here is my first attempt at a slide share presentation

Boo Bubbles

View more presentations from Kathyfs24.

oh and it was my 40th birthday on Saturday - I have never been bothered by my age, but this year I seemed to be hit with it - 40 is OLD - LOL - but I had a great weekend with friends and family and a great party on Saturday night, so it made turning 40 not so bad!

Weekly update - storytime & readers theater

It has been a crazy week here in the media center - lots of classes and my assistant was out this week, plus we had a 4-day weekend last weekend (which was SOO nice!). So here is what we have been doing this week in the media center- celebrating Eric Carle's 80th and the Caterpillar's 40th birthday (he and I are the same age!) Take a Whrrl with my Whrrl story:

Powered by Whrrl

I am also on week two of my readers theater project and it is going REALLY well. This week we gave out the scripts to the kids and they did their first read through. They seem really excited about doing this and with the class today, they had some GREAT comments for each other after our first read through. Next week we will work on better fluency with the text and reading with more emotion and "voices".

next up - my FAVORITE story time of the year - BOO Bubbles!! Plus I have to figure out a great book character costume for Halloween - any suggestions?? I've already been a pirate, the bus driver (from the Pigeon books) and Lilly from Lilly's purple plastic purse, the paper bag princess and Abe Lincoln - hmmm.......

Mo Willems!

Yesterday my school got to be part of Mo Willems simulcast! It was SO much fun! After lots of headaches getting the technology to work in our school (thank you to my AWESOME technology guru at our school and the awesome Internet guy in our county who made it happen) it all went off with out a hitch. My only disappoint with the program, I was REALLY hoping he was going to show us his dinning room (the one with the chalk board walls) so I guess this means that I will still have to hold out for an invite to his house for dinner - I'll even bring desert Mo - really I will!

Between watching this yesterday and watching the video : Eric Carle: Picture Writer this week with my story time classes, I want to quit my job and go work in an art studio - one problem, I have NO artistic talent what so ever. But it does make me want to go out and buy new colored pencils and crisp white paper!

Thanks Hyperion & Mo for letting me be a part of this!

Readers Theater

I am so excited to start my first readers theater project today. I am working with a 4th grade gifted teacher and her 2 classes (one with 15 students, the other with 11 students).

For today's first class we will be explaining to the students WHAT readers theater is. I am going to show them this video of a group of teens doing a readers theater performance at a public library so that they get a REAL sense of what they will be doing. I also have a short United Streaming video on creating your own readers that I will show them. The teacher and I have already chosen a script from the book A Bad Case of Stripes by David Shannon that we will be using as our first script, so to introduce the kids I will be reading the book. We will introduce the scripts at our next meeting next week. Our plan is to meet once a week with these kids and work with them one week on the script and then having them perform the script the next week. We will video tape the kids so they can see themselves performing and also so we can critique their performances.

This project is a perfect example of why media specialists need to TALK with each other. This idea came from a media specialist in my county that I talked to at a meeting we had a few weeks ago. She was describing what she did with a readers theater project at her school and I knew that I wanted to try something here. The hardest part in doing something like this is getting a teacher to work with you and sign on for a project that will be a few weeks in length.

I will update here on how the project is going and what we will be doing each class session that we meet.