If the world were a village

This past week Grade 1-5 classes have watched the animated version of the story If the World were a Village by David J. Smith and illustrated by Shelagh Armstrong. We found the DVD version entertaining and easier to understand. It is difficult to imagine 7 billion people on the planet and we really liked the way the animated version helped us to understand world statistics by reducing the population to 100 people. We learned about world languages, religions, schooling and resources such as food, water and electricity. Learning about this helped us to appreciate what we have.

Here’s a short clip of the 20 minute animated story:

Little Blue and Little Yellow

This past week, ELC classes have read the classic Little Blue and Little Yellow by Leo Lionni. We all agreed it is such a clever story. We’ve been talking about how there are often different versions of similar stories and we compared this retelling of Little Blue and Little Yellow below before making our own pictures of the story using coloured cellophane.

Science in the library!

Following on from the great books of last week, Grade 1-5 read Robert E. Wells’ What’s smaller than a pygmy shrew? 

But first we needed to see how small a pygmy shrew is in comparison to some other familiar objects:

Then we got into the mind-boggling size of bacteria, molecules, atoms and even quarks! We also had a quick look at David M. Schwartz book Q is for Quark. From these authors last week we learned that googol is bigger than the number of atoms in the universe!

Just looking under a microscope at what is living in pond water astonished us:

Huck runs amuck

We really love the books available online from WeGiveBooks.org (our username is bifslibrary and password is read). This week we read a fun book with a lot of new vocabulary, Huck Runs Amuck by Sean Taylor and illustrated by Peter H. Reynolds. Huck’s enthusiasm sure made us laugh!

We needed to learn a bit more about goats and what they like to eat so we watched this video of a baby goat eating pants and hair:

The ugly duckling with ELC

This week ELC library classes read a different version of the classic tale The Ugly Duckling, originally by Hans Christian Andersen. This version is from WeGiveBooks.org and has been beautifully adapted by Rachel Isadora.

Our username for WeGiveBooks.org is: bifslibrary and password is: read.

To understand how baby swans are hatched from their eggs we watched this interesting video:

Maths in the library!

With our new books that have arrived this week, we now have a great selection of fantastic maths books in the BIFS elementary library. We looked at two of them in library classes this week: G is for googol : a math alphabet book written by David M. Schwartz and illustrated by Marissa Moss; and Can you count to a googol? by Robert E. Wells.

These two authors have a wonderful way of making maths and science books meaningful and interesting to elementary (and older!) students. We learned that googol is an incredibly large number (more than the number of atoms in the universe!) and we also learned to make a mobius strip (one sided figure) like the one below: