3rd Grade: Color Thesaurus

3rd graders honed their reference skills using the thesaurus - in print and online. First they created synonym chains out of index cards - some were quite long with up to 25 synonym chains! Next students used artist and author Ingrid Sundberg's Color Thesaurus. The Color Thesaurus is a visual representation of the different names and shades of colors. Students found new words for their favorite colors and then added them to a group poster. Why go with just blue when you have all of these options:

Image from: http://ingridsundberg.com/2014/02/04/the-color-thesaurus/

The word cloud below represents students' color words:

Created with Tagul.com

Wimpy Kid Cover Reveal - Big News!

This week we learned some exciting news - and it was a complete surprise! Like kids all over the world, Woodland Heights students love Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. A new book in the series comes out almost every fall and we are already looking forward to the release of Book 10 in November. April is Diary of a Wimpy Kid month and culminated with a worldwide event, the Diary of a Wimpy Kid Cover Reveal webcast. A few weeks ago our 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade designed their own book 10 covers and submitted them for possible inclusion in the live webcast.

The cover reveal was held April 27th in New York City and streamed live to over 500,000 viewers. Due to scheduling, we did not view the webcast live, but were able to watch the recorded version on Tuesday morning. The excitement was high as we watched and hoped (fingers crossed)  that at least one of our cover designs would be shown in the video. Well, imagine our surprise, when not one, but 11 WHES students' covers were shown. (And one librarian's cover as well.) The students, Mrs. Graham and Mrs. Coats jumped up and down when we saw our covers!

Congratulations to:

Alicia, Alexia, Ben, Corin, Deylon, Jamir, Kairi, Michael, Olivia, Sam C. and Taquasia!!

It has been a fun week watching the webcast with different classes and seeing the students' faces when they see the cover for Book 10 and then see their artwork come on the screen. Check out some of the cover designs below.

Storybird Poetry by Noah

@Storybird 3rd grade students using Storybird to create visual poetry. #NationalPoetryMonth pic.twitter.com/s71oEneRhB

— Elizabeth Graham (@Libscigal) April 23, 2015