Animals Should Definitely NOT Borrow Library Books!

As a culminating activity for our unit on taking care of books and library procedures, my first grade classes created their own version of Judi and Ron Barrett’s Animals Should Definitely Not Wear Clothing. 


This classic story shows some of the troubles animals would have if they wore clothes.  It’s a really fun read-aloud, and it was the perfect springboard into discussing book care.  After all, if we let animals borrow books it wouldn’t be the animals that suffered the worse hardships.  It would be the books!  The students loved imagining all of the silly situations that would happen if these critters were given borrowing privileges!  They acted suitably horrified by all the sorrowful situations that might befall their beloved library books, and they enjoyed taking on the roll of Book Care Experts who know better!

Pages from the original book -- Click image to enlarge!

Before we began writing the text of the story, I opened up the "Sad Bag" of hurt books to remind them of behaviors that might result in a book getting damaged.  Each student selected an animal to write about and then created an illustration.  The students were thrilled to see their work put together into a book that will be on display in the library for all to read and enjoy.   

 

Isabella - 1D

 



Nora - 1B

Mackenzie - 1D

Austin - 1B

 

Lainey - 1D

 

Alyson - 1B

 

 

Max - 1D

 

I wanted them all to be able to share their creations with their families, so I imported their illustrations into PhotoStory and gave them each a chance to read their pages aloud.  I recorded their voices and created a video that you can watch right now!  Enjoy!

 

Mrs. Breault’s class video can be found here:
https://youtu.be/QjgocdeAv8k

 

Mrs. Dicocco’s class video can be found here:
https://youtu.be/1GgYVVHQfwc

 

Fiction Insects

Miss Hurley here again, and today I’d like to share with you a project that the second graders have been working on.  In library class, the students have been studying the differences between fiction and nonfiction books.  To practice this, the students created fiction insects!  Earlier this year they did research projects on insects with their classroom teachers that involved nonfiction information.  So in library, they were given the prompt:  “You’ll never see a…” and they had to finish the sentence by describing something that their insect would never do, making it fiction.  Once they had created their sentence they had to illustrate it.

This project was designed to help them remember that fiction is not real, as illustrated by the silly things that their fiction insects are doing.  After vacation, the final copies will be hanging up above the fiction section of the library to remind them where they can find fiction books. 

But there’s more!  Not only are the insects on display in the library, but we also created a Photo Story video for each class!  Each student got to record his/her own sentence for the video and the whole class worked together for the final slide.  This week the project was finally complete and both classes got to watch their videos.  The kids came up with super creative insects and it was so much fun watching the process.  If you would like to see these awesome insects you can watch the videos here:

Mrs. Gray's Class

Mrs. Pearce's Class

Oh my gosh!  I can’t believe how fast these six weeks have flown by!  Sadly, this is my last blog post as my time here at Ashaway has come to an end.  I have had such a wonderful experience at this school and I am sure going to miss all of my new friends!