Dot Day (Ish Week) Lots of Dots & Many Connections!

One of my favorite weeks of the school year is the week we celebrate International Dot Day! It turns into a whole week of connections and discussing ways to make our mark. It always seems funny to call it "Dot Day Week" so this year I heard it being called "Ish Week" which I LOVED!  This celebration is centered around the book, The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds. There are many good lessons in this book including being brave, encouraging others, and making your mark, whatever your mark may be!

Before school even starts, connections are being made. Shannon Miller & Matthew Winner, two librarians and Dot Day Ambassadors, created a Google doc to manage all of the connections. Matthew has several great blog posts about Dot Day and lesson ideas! When it was all said and done, there were over 60 pages of schedules and requests for connections! We always try to connect every class that visits the library during this week, and this year we even brought in extra classes! At Curtis, connecting with people outside the walls of our school is a normal part of our year, so students begin in kindergarten learning how to interact with others through Skype and Google Hangouts. It is always fun to watch the expression on the kinders faces the first time they connect!

This year, we connected with students in Flower Mound, Texas, Illinois, Vermont , Georgia, Connecticut, Washington, Iowa, Missouri, Frisco, Texas, Wisconsin, Massachusettes, Friendswood, Texas, Austin, Texas, Maine & Maryland! We even connected with some states twice, with different schools! 

Usually, there would only be a few pictures on the blog, but this year I just couldn't narrow them down, so an Animoto presentation was created to show the great week we had!! Enjoy!

Mrs. P's Writing Contest & Skype Visit

Today was our first connection of the year, and we all had such a great time! Last week, I saw these tweets and jumped at the opportunity to connect some of our students with Mrs. P! Thanks to my friend, Shannon Miller, I have had the opportunity to Skype with Mrs. P before, and knew our students would love connecting with her again!

I sent an email to our teachers and had immediate responses from multiple grade levels! Our teachers are used to connecting and jump at the chance when it is presented! We settled on first grade & third grade. Both grades wanted to come as a grade level, which was easy thanks to our new library set up!                                                                                                            

Mrs. P wanted to talk with our students about reading & writing. She has an annual writing contest and we were hoping some of our classes might enter the contest this year. 

The theme for this year is Time Travel! When I walked by classes before the Skype visit I could hear all of the excitement as classes talked about possible topics! What I think is so fun about this writing contest is that it is a class contest. Only one entry per class is accepted, so a class can collaborate on one story or vote for the story they want to enter. There are so many options, and it makes it easy for a teacher to choose what fits best for her classroom environment!

Mrs. P was very entertaining and shared with our students how important it is to read. She even gave the students her secret about writing a story: If you can tell a story, you can write a story! Sounds easy, right!?

Mrs. P told the students that she has over 1,000 pets! She talked about polar bears and wolves! They weren't quite sure if she was "telling a story" or not, but they She then asked our students about their pets, and even about brothers or sisters.

 

She used their answers to create a story right in front of them! Our students enjoyed listening to Mrs. P create a story with characters they gave her!

It was a wonderful visit and I know our students left excited about writing a time travel story to enter into Mrs. P's writing contest! You can find more information about her contest HERE.