Celebrating Black History Month

In honor of Black History month, my story time this week is all about JAZZ - jazz music that is.

I read one of my favorite books about the subject, Lookin for Bird in the Big City by Robert Burleigh. I love reading this book because of the rhythm of the words as you read it. The book is about what *MIGHT* have happened when Miles Davis came to New York City to find and play jazz with his idol, Charlie "Bird" Parker.

After we read the book I play parts of an episode of Reading Rainbow - Hip Cat by Jonathan London. The books is read by the FABULOUS Ann Duquesnay, I don't think I could do this book justice after hearing her read it! If you are lucky enough to have access to Discovery Education streaming video you can download the episode from there (which is what I did). The kids love the music and it is a great introduction to jazz music.

Another thing I did this week for Black History month was with third grade, we did a webquest on Frederick Douglas. You can access the webquest here, but the links are specific to some databases that my school has access to as part of Galileo (our state database portal). I have done quite a few of these webquests with third grade in the past few weeks and they are great for two reasons, one is that they get to learn about the different databases that our school has available and how to naviagte them and two, they learn some facts about the person we are researching (the people are all part of the third grade social studies curriculum). You can take a look at some of the other webquests I created here, but realize that many of the live links will not work unless you are part of my school district.

I hope everyone has a GREAT weekend, it is 70 degrees here in Atlanta today - not bad weather for February!!