snowflake winter wonderlibraryland

Coming back from the winter holidays can be soooooo drab. All of the holiday celebrations are over and the decorations are put away. We miss the glitter so we found the best way to combat the blues is with more blue- and white. As we roll out winter book displays we read about Wilson Bentley the snowflake man and celebrate the beauty of his snowflake photography. There are so many great winter picture books that each year we read a different one to pique interest in snowflakes, but a favorite is Just One Flake. This snow and sweaters choice slide is a great place to start out snowflake studies, too. Then we get to snowflake making!

Each student K-5 creates a flake and I try to hang every single one! We cover how to fold and cut so that the snowflakes are hexagonal just like snowflakes in nature. For kinder, coffee filters are easier to cut, they are also fun to color using markers and then spritz with water for a melting effect. The best part of this year’s snowflakes is that when we hung them all up, I added some small animal pictures in between the flakes to create a huge I spy display. Kids loved trying to find all of the hidden objects! The group in the below pic is recording the number of each item they spotted!

dinovember – something to read and roar about

This month in the library we roared more than usual, but mostly it was on topic roaring. We read, crafted, sang and stomped like dinosaurs. As always, I made a bitmoji library as a basis of our theme for the month. One of my favorite activities was to read If the Dinosaurs Came Back, then have students create a background and dinosaur in the same style as the illustations. It turned out the be a little challenging for some of them so I helped by printing out dino shapes for the foreground image.

We found great hats to make on the interwebs, and lots of fun dino themed games on pbs kids and abcya for our computer brain break day. We also made a makeshift green screen from butcher paper to practice our dramatic poses in front of scary dinosaurs- easy and free with the DoInk app.

To make a copy of the dinosaur library in google slides click here, to view in presentation mode use: https://bit.ly/bgbsdinovr