It has taken me a while to get back to posting! We had a great term with Year 6 students using the picture books from the Children’s Book Council Awards. Each student worked with a partner to prepare a showbag of items related to one of the picture story books. We gave them a range of craft material and they had to come up with their interpretations of the text in a minimum of six ways. They also had a crteria sheet which helped identify the areas that the judges look for in deciding the winner of the two picture book categories. They had to use the criteria sheet to identify a range of elements about the texts. During Book Week each group presented their work to all the Year 6 students at our special GRADE SIX celebration during Book Week. I have included a photopeach below which identify all the books nominated for an award in 2010.

Children’s Book Council Awards 2010 on PhotoPeach

This term Year 6 will be focusing on developing skills in email etiquette. Initially the lesson will commence with a prezi on ‘Essential email’. After class discussion we will examine some scenarios associated with emails and the students will work in groups to address key questions about each email. After discussing the cases the girls will develop a word or publisher page which highlights key elements in using email. This information will be saved as a pdf and then they will be uploaded into Issuu to make a booklet.

Our second meeting went really well today.  A couple of extra girls have asked to join after seeing the others in the group which was fantastic.  I showed them a clip for one of the new books for this month–Beautiful Malice. In this clip the author is reading a passage from her book.

There is also an interview with the author which the students enjoyed listening to.

The presentations in Year 6 went really well and the glogs were great. I had them all print out a copy of the glog. To get the glog to print so it shows the whole page, a student told me to right click and then choose print from there. It worked! It took quite a while to go through all the glogs, letters and bookmarks in their presentations to the class. I would definitely do this activity again. The rubric needs to be reviewed for next time. I have embedded a couple of glogs.

Our most recent display was to link in with Mother’s Day. Our theme was  ‘Celebrating Women in our Families’. We had pictures of girls and women in their families on our TV screen and a range of books highlighting women in the community. I loved the idea from ‘Skerricks blog’ about making bookmarks to link in with a range of different displays.  Prior to that was a huge display for Anzac Day with large maps highlighting the various Theatres of War at which Australians have served. I organise the Anzac Service at school and used a number of diary entries from soldiers in the service. These diary entries are also enlarged and placed on pinboards in the Library.

Just started off with our Year 6 Book presentations. This was the students first experience with Glogster incorporated into a task. They were great and really demonstrated the students thinking about a scene in the book and how to represent this on a poster. They were excited and engaged. That’s when I remember why I love this job. I have to try and work out if I can embed them into this post. I used the Education section of Glogster.

I have a few Book Clubs operating across the school. These have been held at lunchtime. In Year 7 I have the Captain of English together with two Year 8 girls operate the Year 7 Book Club. They meet each fortnight and eat lunch in the Library and discuss books, choose new ones etc. In Year 8 we meet each fortnight and have Tim Tams as our special treat. I buy six copies of two different novels. We swap them around half way through the month. However I found for the Senior girls that they were so busy at lunchtime they really didn’t have time to always come to Book club.  So I decided to make it breakfast and change our name! It was great and the girls really enjoyed it. I purchased juice, milo and raison toast. We used a sandwich maker for the raison toast and put in baking paper to cover the toast. That worked really well because often raison toast can start to burn quickly in a toaster. I saw them do this at Maca’s. I have made up a roster for choosing the books–two girls each month until November.  This month they chose the new Melina Marchetta novel, the Piper’s Son and The Time Traveler’s Wife.

This is from MyJugaad.in where you can create a slideshow of relevant websites. I made up this one from my Diigo links on cybersafety as I wanted to have a place where I could quickly locate items I could use. It also helps to remind me by viewing the pages which sites may be relevant for particular groups.

Picked this up on twitter.

Thanks to this link from @heyjudeonline.