Everyone Loves a Treat

The NYC Department of Education’s Library Services Department has the most phenomenal staff. Not only are they supportive and constantly provide numerous workshops for school librarians, occasionally they offer us nice little treats to share with our students. Thanks to Ms. Dominguez, today I received a box of brand new Dr. Seuss books and all I had to do was explain in writing how our school community celebrates Dr. Seuss. As you can see from my past post right here in this blog our students deserve these new books because they are fans! I can't wait to share the books with them.

Celebrating Dr. Seuss

Everyone knows Dr. Seuss is one of the most entertaining authors of children's books.  Every year during the first week of March we honor Dr. Seuss by spending the day in our pajamas while reading his stories and taking part in a number of activities.  Students who visited the library were able to buddy up with a friend and find a cozy area to read a couple of his most well known titles like, The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham.  I also read out loud one of my favorites, Bartholomew and the Oobleck.  Students had fun thinking of adjectives to describe oobleck and then created a list of objects that may have the same characteristics...a list that included some very common objects, like gum or clay and some "not so common," gross objects like....well I am sure you can only imagine. 

The only thing missing from the lesson was actually making "oobleck".  One library period is not enough time to create the sticky oobleck so I decided to have my ELL students from the Saturday Academy create "oobleck".  Ms. Chan and Ms. Vasquez were extremely helpful in making sure all of the ingredients and tools were available for the students.  It was a messy, but exciting activity for the students because they were better able to describe "oobleck" after they had the opportunity to touch it and see it for themselves.