Lowell Library Newsletter

Learning in the library often involves moving our bodies to clear our brains to whole body listen and learn. From finding rhyming partners to using our bodies to keep the rhythm of a song or poem, or repeating a pattern of dance steps before we create a pattern in code we find many ways to learn. Our current favorites include Banana Banana Meatball, Scratch Garden Freeze Dance 4 (clean that house!), and Salamander Yoga.

Kindergarten: We learned about:

• Poetry:
• Structure
• Rhythm
• Rhyme

First Grade: We learned about:

• Poetry:
• Structure of a poem
• Rhythm
• Rhyme

Second Grade: Learned about:

• What makes a poem?
• Poem Art: Coding poems
• Rhythm and other poetic elements such as alliteration, onomatopoeia, and rhyme

Third: We learned about:

• Coding as the language of computers
• Poem Art: Coding Poems
• Haiku

Fourth Grade: Learned about:

• Creating a citation for a research source
• Ingredients of a poem (with Kwame Alexander)
• What makes a poem a poem and not something else

Fifth Grade: We learned about:

• Copyright
• Fair Use
• Creating citations with Google Citations

We took a journey to Scranimal Island! Who lives on Scranimal island? Mixed up animals. Some are part animal/ part food; others are two animals mixed together. Told as a collection of poems, students explore what they know about rhythm, rhyme, and other poetic elements through poems describing each crazy scrambled up animal. Our final activity is to create an original scranimal.

Third grade wrapped up their unit on computational thinking by exploring coding as the language we use to communicate with computers. Our next step involved identifying the mood in a poem and coding a poem to animate the text and background to reflect the mood expressed in the poem. We wrapped up poetry by creating class haiku.

• My child has a library book from before quarantine. What should I do with it? Please bring it back! There is no penalty for pre-quarantine books and I would love to have them back in the library so other kids can enjoy them.
• Will kids check out books after December? No, we will be storing our wonderful library until we return to Lowell in Fall 2023.
• Where can we access the databases and encyclopedias? Use the Lowell Library website and under SEARCH find a list of the databases students have access to through the school.
• What will students learn without the library? Don't worry! I selected a lot of books to continue our read alouds each week. We will also take this time to explore more aspects of our digital learning curriculum such as digital citizenship and computers as tools.

Email: kelly.mccollum@watertown.k12.ma.us
Website: http://lowelllibrary.com
Location: 175 Orchard Street, Watertown, MA, USA
Phone: 617.926.7770
Twitter: @jrlowellreads