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

Reading Goals Padlet

Padlet is a web tool that allows students to share their thoughts and ideas on a virtual bulletin board. This week 4th and 5th grade students added books they want to read this year to the following Padlet. Tiny Titans, Captain Awesome and The One and Only Ivan received multiple mentions. I can't wait to see our students achieve their reading goals this year!

Created with Padlet

5th Grade Word Mover Poetry

During National Poetry Month, various grades have created "found poetry" using ReadWriteThink.org's WordMover web tool. This week 5th grade students got to try and their efforts were impressive. Below are two especially noteworthy examples. 

"Misunderstood" by Tatum

"Be" by Kada

RT @Libscigal: @RWTnow 2nd grade student poetry created with WordMover. #NationalPoetryMonth pic.twitter.com/Lffy1d8PDi
— ReadWriteThink.org (@RWTnow) April 21, 2015

National Poetry Month Activity: Storybird

April is National Poetry Month and we will have poetry centered lessons, centers and activities all month long in the Woodland Heights Library. Today I tested out Storybird's poem creator. Choose artwork from a wide variety of options and then select words that fit the picture to form a poem. Hope the third graders have fun with this!

Student Voki Gallery

Click below to check out our students' awesome Roaring 20s' Vokis:

Presentation Day

5th grade students present their Roaring 20s Vokis, Tagxedos, and trading cards.

Thankfulness Padlets

Created with Padlet

2nd Grade Owl Tagxedo

Here is one more Tagxedo word cloud by our second graders, this time featuring owls. Great job Mr. Dearybury's class!

4th Grade Book Genre Word Clouds

Fourth grade classes have been studying book genres during their library classes. To show their understanding, students worked with partners to create a Tagxedo word cloud representing a specific book genre. Here are some of the best!

Created by Josiah and Alexia

Created by Pre'Asha and Zunaira

5th Grade Animal Research: Digital Product

The 5th grade classes have been working on animal research for the past two weeks. This week they will demonstrate their learning with a final digital product: an animal shaped word cloud. The students will create word clouds using Tagxedo. The best examples will be published to this blog (with the students' permission).

Here is a sneak peek at the lesson introduction which was created using Voki: