Celebrating Spring!

Ever since I found this TeleFable online last summer I have been DYING to do this for story time in the media center - well it is FINALLY spring and we are making flowers in the media center this week.

The book is Rose's Garden by one of my favorite author/illustrators Peter Reynolds. The TeleFable story (he owns the company with his brother) came out before the printed book as a tribute to the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway in Boston. The Telefable was so popular, they rushed the publication of the book to last fall.

I love sharing with my students new ways to read a book (even though I do think the good old fashioned way is still pretty good too) and the TeleFable is a great way to tell a story to them, and so far they have loved it!

After I read the story, the students are making tissue paper flowers. This has proved to be a bit more challenging for my Kindergarten students than I thought, but with a little teacher help, the flowers have turned out well. Take a look below at some pictures of our week!

As for me, I know spring is FINALLY here because I have started to unearth all my flip flops from their winter hide out AND it is only 9 more days until Red Sox opening day - Sunday night, 8pm, ESPN vs the Yankees!

GO SOX!

Science Story Times that ROCK!

Here is my presentation from the Georgia Children's Literature Conference on science story times. Many of the story times I describe in my presentation have been highlighted here on this blog, but now they are all in one place! If you attended my presentation - THANK YOU - since I am posting this on Thursday night, before I actually present, I hope you enjoyed the presentation and I didn't do anything too embarrassing - like tripping over my laptop cord (yep, happened before). Thank you to the Georgia Children's Literature Conference for letting me present!

Science Storytimes

View more presentations from Kathy Schmidt.

Reader's Theater performance

This is a PowerPoint that my 4th grade readers theater group did with Melissa Stewart's FABULOUS readers theater script (that goes along with her book, Under the Snow).- they drew the pictures to go along with the book and this was the background during their "live" performance. I had them add the sound to the PowerPoint yesterday so that I could post it. I had a hard time finding a place to "host" it so that you could hear the sound, this is the result - my voice is the first voice you hear and it sounds like I am talking with my nose plugged - which I was not and it does not sound that way on the original PowerPoint, but, you'll at least get to see what my kids have been doing. Next project for this group, they are choosing a book and writing their own readers theater that they will perform for their parents near the end of school in May!

Check out the slide show here.

Leprechauns & Rainbows

My Favorite holiday is almost upon us - St. Patrick's day! I'm a nice Irish Catholic girl from Massachusetts so of course St. Patrick's day was always a big holiday where I grew up, so I try and share a little of the history and music with my students (most of whom don't know what the holiday is!).

This year my St. Pat's story time is all about those funny little people - the leprechauns! The story: That's What Leprechauns Do by Eve Bunting (a daughter of Ireland) The activity: making rainbows using science. I turn off the lights and have a glass of water, a flashlight and a piece of white card stock - I talk about how rainbows form and then shine the light into the glass of water and a rainbow appears on the white paper - MAGIC! Then I turn the lights back on and pass out rainbow glasses (I found these in our science lab, but you can order them through Steve Spangler Science also) and the kids LOVE these.

I have already started celebrating the holiday and I made an Irish feast last night, corned beef & cabbage, bangers & mash (Irish sausages & mashed potatoes) and homemade brown Irish soda bread (new recipe, which was yummy!)

Don't forget to wear your green on Wednesday!

Dr. Seuss Project

Wanted to give an update on how my first FLIP video camera project went! - It went better than I expected and I learned a lot. The teacher was so happy at the outcome and the kids seemed to love seeing their "book ads" on tv in the morning. I have tried to figure out a way I could post them here, but they have students in them and I can't figure out how to put a black dot on their faces - but for next time I found a GREAT idea - have them put masks over their faces as they read - then I CAN post them, not only here, but on my schools website as well!

The biggest thing I learned - we need to use a tripod! The kids video taped each other (we had a groups of 5, one was the videographer and the others were on camera) and I realized that no matter how hard they tried, they wiggled the camera and the result was a wiggly video. I think that if the project involved shorter video clips or video clips where the subject would be moving, it might be ok to do it without a tripod, but for something like this a tripod is a must. I just hope that the tripods I already own work with the FLIP cameras.

I am hoping to try at least one more project this school year, but as we approach spring break and testing season, my teachers have so little time to do some FUN stuff like this.

Happy Read Across America Day!

Our school celebrated yesterday, but, I had a touch of the stripes yesterday....

The picture misses the fact that I did INDEED have painted stripes on my face and I had some striped tights on too!

But I did eat my lima beans yesterday and I am feeling much better today!