Watch student faces light up as they make their own gorgeous designs using a small number of blocks and digital stickers! This lesson builds on the understanding of loops from previous lessons and gives students a chance to be truly creative. This activity is fantastic for producing artifacts for portfolios or parent/teacher conferences.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
Students enjoy using the almanac and it is a great way to teach social studies and information skills like how to interpret a table or graph as well as ELA skills like how to scan for information.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
Students enjoy using the almanac and it is a great way to teach social studies and information skills like how to interpret a table or graph as well as ELA skills like how to scan for information.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
This template supports elementary teachers and librarians in working collaboratively to create lessons that build science practice and inquiry skills in alignment with state and national science standards, and that address the Common Core literacy shifts around close reading and building textual evidence.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
This was a Unit Plan I wrote for my substitute when I had to be out on medical leave. Therefore, there's no collaboration and it follows a set routine.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
Work In Progress: These short poems feature sight words and introduce Kindergarten and First Graders to basic Library concepts. I pair them with activities from Write-N-Seek Sight Words by Immacula A. Rhodes (New York: Scholastic, 2017) to introduce the topic of the lesson and to activate prior knowledge. How I use them: As students are coming in and finding their seats, they pick up a copy of the sight word poem that has one of Rhodes’ activities on the other side. They begin doing the activity while we are waiting for everyone to get seated. Once everyone is seated, I direct them to flip over to the sight word poem side. It’s OK that they didn’t all finish the activity. They can finish it later or use it to engage with caregivers at home. I encourage the students to read the poems over and over again with their caregivers in order to help them develop fluency in reading. For Kindergarten, I read the complete poem, then I have them echo-read line-by-line. For First Grade, I read the complete poem, then we all read the poem together. Reading the poem first helps prepare the students for success in the choral reading. I never ask students to cold-read aloud in the media center. Reading aloud is a stressful and embarrassing task for many students and I don’t want them to associate the library with stress and embarrassment! Reading the poem with expression is important. It helps engage the students and echoing the expression helps them develop fluency and comprehension for their own reading. The poems are designed to introduce library lessons and serve as my Activator for the lessons. Classroom teachers sometimes follow up by having students work in pairs to practice reading the poems with expression. I hope you find these poems contribute to your students’ success!
Material Type: Reading, Teaching/Learning Strategy, Vocabulary
For this lesson, the students will work in small collaborative groups investigating a polar bear. Students will describe the habitat of a polar bear and determine what characteristics it possesses to live within that ecosystem. They will also determine if the ecosystem the animal lives in becomes compromised or changed, will that animal still have a chance of survival. They will discuss and decipher the information in order to generate opinions. Students will present their ideas to the class to create a boxes and bullets graphic organizer. This lesson was developed by Lindsey Chavis-Turner as part of their completion of the North Carolina Global Educator Digital Badge program. This lesson plan has been vetted at the local and state level for standards alignment, Global Education focus, and content accuracy.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
In this lesson, literature and shared writing are used to teach letter-writing format and promote authentic letter writing. Students listen to and talk about stories dealing with correspondence before participating in a collaborative, whole-group letter-writing activity. They go on to write their own letters to deliver or mail to adult school helpers, family, or friends. Students often go on to write letters on their own time, which may generate ongoing correspondence.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
Students create a story book about the library/media center using various technologies and other resources.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
This library scavenger hunt is a fun way for students to get familiar with their library, its resources, and its collection.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
School librarian Marcia Mardis describes what the library can offer to teachers and students who want to produce a focused, engaging, and effective science fair. This article appears in the free online magazine Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle, which explores the seven essential principles of the climate sciences for K-grade 5 classrooms.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Diagram/Illustration, Teaching/Learning Strategy
Epic has over 25,000 books, videos and quizzes for students. Elementary teachers are able to sign up for a free account and use the Epic library with their students. Students will learn how to navigate a digital library and use appropriate tools to aid in their reading. In this activity, students will be introduced to fables and will use Microsoft Paint or Google Drawings to illustrate the moral of the story.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Game, Interactive, Module
In this article, the author shows how school librarians and elementary teachers can help students create science lapbooks. The article appears in the free, online magazine Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle, which is structured on the seven essential principles of the climate sciences.
Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy
This article from Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle provides ideas on how school librarians can work with elementary teachers to teach about the Sun's impact on weather and climate. The author introduces the Standards for the 21st Century Learner, developed by the American Association of School Librarians. The author focuses on Standard 1, which calls for students to inquire, think critically, and gain knowledge through developing and refining questions, investigating answers, seeking divergent perspectives in information, and assessing whether the information found answers the questions posed. The free, online magazine draws its themes from the Seven Essential Principles of Climate Literacy, with each issue focusing on one of the seven principles.
Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy
A new instructional model, called Argument-Driven Inquiry (ADI), is introduced to elementary teachers in this article. The author shows how school librarians and classroom teachers can collaborate to help students construct and communicate evidence, or arguments. Evidence buckets, a collaborative activity, and related online resources are presented. The article appears in the free online magazine Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle, which is structured around the seven essential principles of climate literacy.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan, Teaching/Learning Strategy
This resource contains stories to teach students about lending and borrowing.
Material Type: Interactive
Next steps and support for Webinar #1 of the Curriculum Review Academy.
Material Type: Presentation
Want to see what a sample comment looks like using the SLMC Curriculum Review Rubric?
Material Type: Reference Material
In this lesson, students gain a deeper understanding of the fairy tale genre by reading fractured versions of familiar tales. Students will compare and contrast the fractured tales to the originals.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
This is an enrichment Tic Tac Toe that corresponds to 5th grade science (Weather and Natural Diasters) and ELA standards.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
