2012 NH Ladybug Award

This fall, NHCS students in kindergarten, first, second, and third grade will be introduced to the ten picture books nominated for the 2012 NH Ladybug Award. In November, they will join students across the state in selecting this year's winner. Watch this blog for details about each book - and ask your student about them as we have fun reading them all!

Backpack Books

As third graders, we can take our library books home with us! If we keep our book in our backpack, it will never get lost. It will not get ruined by rain or mud or bird poop. It will be safe from pets and little children and from other things that could destroy it. If your book is in your backpack it will be with you all the time and you will be able to enjoy reading anywhere - at home, in the classroom, in the after school program, in the car or on the bus. You will always have a good book with you that you can read!

written by NHCS Third Graders

'Tis the Season

This last week before our Christmas break, students have been busy writing labels, greetings, sentences, and paragraphs. Much of the work had to do with Christmas traditions and holiday greetings. Fourth and fifth graders drew (or stamped!) a picture in TuxPaint, took a screen shot of their artwork, and inserted it into a GoogleDoc, which they then shared electronically with a chosen member of the staff. Third and second graders constructed a short paragraph about a family tradition, then illustrated it using TuxPaint. Our youngest students, still learning about the painting program, drew a Christmas object, then used the Fill option to color it in. A quick label finished the project.

TuxPaint is a versatile, robust program which is free for most operating systems. To download it to your computer at home, click here. And don't forget to download the stamps!

Ladybug Book #7: Guyku

At school today, Mrs. Wilson's class was the first to hear this Ladybug Award nominee, Guyku by Bob Raczka and Peter Reynolds. Guyku is a collection of seasonal haiku poems written to appeal to boys (and girls too)! We learned that haikus are short, structured poems with a pattern: line 1 has 5 syllables, line 2 has 7 syllables, and line 3 has five syllables. We counted syllables as we read some of the funny haikus in the book!

Suddenly the fire alarm rang! We filed out of the building and waited for the all-clear from Mrs. Cook. When we got back to ICT, we wrote this haiku about our experience!

Fire alarm beeps loud

Makes you jump and hurts your ears

We line up and leave!

All About Me

Third grade has been using Kidspiration to make a graphic about themselves. Kidspiration is an organizational software with many visual and writing features. Students learned three ways to find images to use with this software, and made choices based on their specialties, their likes, and their families. Captions were added, then reflections so the work can be saved to each digital portfolio as a snapshot representing third grade life.

Summertime ICT!

Happy Summer! I hope you spend lots of time outside in the sunshine. I hope you read lots of books! And, if you want a little computer time, I hope you like the Tizmos page I made for you to use at home - and that Seed Ball game we played is on it!) Click right here to find it!

Free Math Apps

Beginning today and for four days only, Everyday Mathematics® is offering free math game apps for your iPhone, an iTouch, or iPad. These games are the same as the Everyday Math online games students play on comptuers and they're electronic versions of the games each grade level plays in class. These games reinforce major concepts presented in our math program. To find the games, go to the iTunes App Store, then search for Everyday Mathematics. After April 16th, the games will go back to their original price - so get them while you can!

Iditarod 2011

image: CC-BY Frank Kovalchek

Tomorrow is the ceremonial start of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, the annual race from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska. The official start will come on Sunday. Before vacation, Mrs. Sawicki met with third, fourth, and fifth graders to show students the official web site for the Iditarod, to give them some background information and history about the race, and to have them choose a musher to follow. It's easy to get caught up in the race - it's full of sportsmanship, extreme weather, adverse conditions, long lonely distances between checkpoints, and lots and lots of dogs! During the ten or so days that the race traditionally runs, Mrs. Sawicki posts daily information about standings and locations on a central bulletin board in the main hallway of the school. Students can use the website to read about daily events, calculate distances, prizes, and monetary costs to the mushers, and watch interviews by mushers as they stop at checkpoints along the trail. If you'd like to keep up with the race at home, the official website is iditarod.com. It makes for great dinnertime conversation since so much happens over the course of 24 hours!

A sidenote: for the last four years, the Iditarod has been won by a Lance Mackey, a consumate musher and cancer survivor from Alaska. He's the man to beat this year - and that should make the 2011 Iditarod all the more interesting!

For the kids, here's the 2011 Iditarod's youngest musher, Cain Carter, talking about his hopes for the race.

Keyboarding

This winter, third grade has begun the Type to Learn 4 program for keyboarding skills. Here's the post from last fall with online keyboard games and programs in case any of you want to practice at home. Just please remember to keep your fingers in place, thumbs on the space bar, and reach to tap keys! Train your brain!

image by Cy21.WP:CC-BY-SA

The Winner!

The winner of the 2010 Ladybug Award is Princess Hyacinth, the surprising story of a girl who floated. It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Princess Hyacinth!

Princess Hyacinth is a girl with a strange problem. She floats. So she doesn't float in the air, she has a heavy crown. She has heavy clothes. These weight her down so she doesn't float away. One day, she takes off all the heavy clothes and off she floats in her Royal Underwear.

This book has wonderful pictures by Lane Smith. Author Florence Parry Heide tells a very funny and unique story. When she writes, she uses a writing technique called voice. It sounds like the author is talking directly to you, the reader. Here's an example: "Well, you're saying, everyone has a problem. But this was an unusual problem."

Even disappointed kids who voted for other books believe that Princess Hyacinth was a good choice for this year's Ladybug Award. If you want to see the voting results for the rest of the nominated books, just click here.

Time to Vote!

The votes for the Ladybug Award are in - at least for New Hampton Community School!! And it's Sleep, Big Bear, Sleep by a nose! After listening to the third graders' Ladybug Award Podcast, here's how K-3 NHCS students voted. These results will be sent to the Center for the Book in Concord and will be combined with the votes of primary grade children from all over New Hampshire. The winner will be announced sometime in December - we'll post those results here as well!

NHCS Ladybug Podcast 2010

Click below to listen to the NHCS Ladybug Podcast 2010, written and recorded by the third graders. Which book will you vote for?

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Many Ways to Concord

Using GoogleMaps, third graders tracked many different routes to get from New Hampton to Concord - straight down Route 93, south on 132 to Route 4, out through Bristol and Franklin...

We discussed how the internet is a lot like the roads to Concord. There are so many different ways to get from the student to the information the student seeks! We learned about effective searching and choosing keywords that will lead to the correct information. We learned about directories and saw how they're set up in categories and subcategories.

We tried out the search engine and directory features for YahooKids, KidsClick, AskKids, and Quintara for Kids. We looked at the number of hits for a keyword using KidsClick and compared it to the same search using Google. Kids' search engines usually only show results that are readable and useful for students, making finding what we want a LOT easier!

A Gift for You!

Christmas week both second and third graders used TuxPaint, a free painting program, to draw a seasonal picture and make a label or a sentence about their work. You can have TuxPaint on your computer at home, too - download it here. Happy Holidays!!