For most of January and February, Students in 101, 102, 103, 104 and 6 are becoming eBook authors.  We are planning and preparing first in print.  Each students is practicing upper and lower case letters, choosing a theme for their alphabet books and then recording one word for each letter in their planning document.  Books range from garden books to Star Wars books and a whole lot of K and 1 inspiration in-between.

After students have completed their planning documents they are moving into the Book Creator App to create their eBooks.  Finished eBooks will be published on the library’s website.

Students in rooms 4 and 217 have been working over the past 4 weeks on a mini research project about Influential Americans with a focus on Black History Month and those who have enriched out world.  Using PebbleGo and World Book Online as our sources for factual information, students took notes, wrote monologues and the recorded their work using FlipGrid.

Our FlipGrids are password protected.  Please e-mail your students’ classroom teacher or Mrs. Wynkoop  for the password.

• Room 4 – Ms. Bader, Influential Americans
• Room 217 – Ms. Filep, Black History

As a yearlong focus, students in 218 and 216 are reading one book from each of our genre classifications each month. Our newly “genrefied” fiction collection allows students to select from: Adventure, Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Science Fiction, Mystery, Realistic Fiction, Scary, Humor, Sports and Graphic Novels.  Check back each month for a brief presentation of select books presented to our DBE Readers.  The picture to the right is a pile of holds placed by 218 Readers after our genre talk 11/14/2016!

• October – Mystery
• November – Science Fiction
• December – Historical Fiction
• January – Humor
• February – Realistic Fiction

Students in rooms 212 and 214 have been working over the past 3 weeks on a mini research project about Influential Americans, Presidents and First Ladies.  Using PebbleGo and World Book Online as our sources for factual information, students took notes, wrote monologues and the recorded their work using FlipGrid.

Our FlipGrids are password protected.  Please e-mail your students’ classroom teacher or Mrs. Wynkoop  for the password.

Ms. Messom – FlipGrid room 212

Ms. Lipsen – FlipGrid room 214

Ks and 1s will leaning about famous trees in preparation for a Treehouse unit in Art with Ms. McNeer.  We will be using Celebritrees by Margi Preus as our mentor text for this unit.  In order to provide our youngest readers with access to a more complicated text I have created an eBook for students to access while working in the library.

Thanks so much for another successful book fair in partnership with the University Bookstore!  Sales over the three days were $6700.  That means we earned around $1400 worth of books for our own library.  We have already purchased $600 in new books that are on the shelf and ready for checkout.

I would like to extend my appreciation to our two book fair co-chairs, Laura Tiberio and June Lembo.  In addition, a special thanks to Debbie Whittington, Debby Bacharach, Leslie Braly, Michelle Jones, Margarita Durham, and Karl Law for helping with set-up and take down.  We couldn’t do it without you!

Our school-wide mock election has come to a close alongside our national presidential election.  Thanks to Capstone Publications and PebbleGo for provided both the resources for our research and the platform through which our students voted.

Over 5 weeks all DBE students, K-5, used PebbleGo to research the two candidates from the two major parties before submitting their votes online.  This collaborative venture with all our DBE classroom teachers was a huge success.  We saw 418 of our 427 students vote on Monday November 7, 2016.

Over the next couple of weeks our 4th and 5h grade students will be working to gather objective facts about both candidates (from the 2 major parties) for President of the United States.  We’ll be using a simple google form to compile and share our findings.

More than ever, in this very divisive political climate, we find a greater need to search for facts first and then use those facts to drive our political conversations at home.

• Facts about Donald Trump
• Facts about Hillary Clinton

On Wednesday October 19, 2016 both the Seattle Education Association and the Seattle Public School District will come together to celebrate a day of unity and commit ending the opportunity gap that exists in our district.

While the DBE Library has a continued commitment to providing diverse books for all our students K-5, this seems like an appropriate time to provide a list of a selection of DBE Library materials that might help to promote understanding, commit to activism, and discuss issues of race head on.

To begin the year, I have the pleasure of collaborating with Ms. McNeer (our art teacher) on a unit that explores using data to inform and inspire art.  Laurie Frick serves as our mentor artist for this unit.

To begin our unit we will take a sample survey to begin to think more specifically about questions we might ask, data we might collect and how this process will inform and inspire our artwork.

4/5, 3/4 classes will be posting their surveys here to aid in collecting a large enough sample of data:

• Room 7’s Survey
• Room 8’s Survey
• Room 213’s Survey
• Room 209’s Survey
• Room 5’s Survey