Today was the first of two visits to F.AVE by Adam Gidwitz! He spoke to most of our 4th grade classes, and they loved him. Adam told us the story of Snow White. But in this story there was no singing, no little birds and deer flitting around, no kissing (thank goodness). Snow White died 3 different times in the true Grimm Brothers version, did you know that? Adam is a master storyteller, and the students were riveted. If your children come home chanting terrible things, blame him.
My favorite part of the talk was what he said at the end. He talked about how when he was a kid, he never considered himself a writer. He never "wrote." However, he loved playing with his G.I. Joe dolls and making them act out stories. He would practice basketball, telling stories to himself the whole time. After he became a writer, the way he wrote was to tell a story out loud and type it while he told it. And he realized that he'd been a writer this whole time! There's no difference between telling a story while shooting hoops or acting it out with your action figures and typing it into the computer. How many kids out there are writers and don't even know it? What a wonderful thought. The Division Series were extremely exciting! When I checked the results at 1:00 on the last day of voting, Diary of a Wimpy Kid was beating Harry Potter by over 100 votes in each game! By the time the series was over, Harry Potter had made an insane comeback and WON! Check out how close each game was! In the battle of the Rick Riordan series, the race was also tight! The Lightning Thief won in Game 1 over The Lost Hero, but the Heroes of Olympus series won all the other games by a slight margin!
Our Wild Card results are in!
Now, in our division series we have two monster match ups!
Vote through Tuesday, October 28 to see who will make the final World Series competition! I'm starting a new F.AVE tradition this week...the World Series of Books (and, yes, there will be a Final Four in March, and possibly a Super Bowl). I've chosen our 8 most popular book series to compete for the title. It works like this:
Rules: • You can vote as many times as you want. • Anyone can vote; students, teachers, staff, parents, little or older siblings. • Have fun with it! Here is the link: favemlbworldseries.weebly.com Last week our Newbery Book Club met to discuss Because of Winn Dixie, by Kate DiCamillo. We all agreed that the book gets a huge thumbs up, and we are looking forward to all of the On the Same Page activities that are coming up in Decatur over the next month. We began our book club with a little snack of egg salad sandwiches, pickles, and Dump Punch, the same menu as India Opal's party at the end of the book. Apparently pickles are a favorite of 4th and 5th graders! Who knew? Even the egg salad sandwiches were consumed fairly quickly. We are hoping to participate in the 90 Second Newbery Film Festival at the end of the year, so we started our book club out by reading a play that summarized the novel. We talked a bit about characters that were left out of the summary and what they liked and didn't like about it. We then broke into smaller groups and discussed why we liked the title and how it fit the book. Students also discussed the theme of friendship and tried to come up with other "big idea" themes that applied to the book. Afterwards, student chose an activity to complete. Because Opal had a list of the 10 things she knew about her mother, students came up with a 10 Things list about themselves. What 10 things do you think people would remember about you? Other students chose to create a character collage by either drawing pictures or cutting out magazine pictures to represent their chosen character! This week to connect our author visit with our curriculum, we have taken a break from our media center centers. Adam Gidwitz's books are collections of traditional stories (fairy tales, fables, Mother Goose) which are twisted around to make new, wonderfully hilarious and scary novels. This week, students are reading fairy tales from other cultures (India, Czechoslovakia, China, Scandanavia, Native American culture). They are connecting them with the more well-known stories from the Brothers Grimm and creating a new title for their "mash-up" fairy tale. Tune in next week to see what we do next with these new mash-up stories! Guess who is coming to F.AVE on October 30 & 31?!! Adam Gidwitz! Mr. Gidwitz is the author of A Tale Dark and Grimm, In A Glass Grimmly, and The Grimm Conclusion, 3 bloody, gory, spooky, scary, hilarious, wonderful books that are perfect for the season! Don't worry, parents, they are very age appropriate! If you've not read one, check out the book trailer below. (I had to create this for my graduate classes, and I love these books so much, I chose A Tale Dark and Grimm even before I worked at F.AVE.) Students can pre-order the books and get Mr. Gidwitz to sign them. To learn more go to our media center website! A Tale Dark and Grimm from Corinne Smith on Vimeo. These last few weeks, we have been working in centers when students come to the media center. I think it's been a great success. We have 5 centers.
We have had a lot of fun with the centers so far! They are designed so students rotate through them over a period of 5 weeks, which is almost a full term for us. That gives me one week to do something else, which is great because if you read my next blog, you will see that we have some exciting events coming up, and we will be doing some awesome activities to prepare! |
Corinne Smith
Media Specialist at Fifth Avenue Upper Elementary in Decatur, GA Archives
November 2023
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