During this last week of the school year, Elementary library classes read Rikki Tikki Tavi by Rudyard Kipling. This version is retold and illustrated by Jerry Pinkney. This story is so exciting and we understand now why Rudyard Kipling is famous for his Jungle Book stories.
We also watched a Mongoose and Cobra on this National Geographic video clip:
Last Thursday, grade 5 students spent the day in Middle school and during library orientation, Mr Loste read them the captivating story, The Composition written by Antonio Skármeta and illustrated by Alfonso Ruano. The main character in this story, Pedro, is faced with an ethical dilemma when he is asked to write an essay for a government official representing the military dictatorship of his country. This brilliant book is well deserving of the many literary prizes it has been awarded and illustrates many of the IB attitudes.
This week grade 1-4 students learned about a hawk that lives in New York City. Pale Male: Citizen Hawk of New York City written by Janet Schulman and illustrated by Meilo So, is the astonishing true story of a red tailed hawk that has lived in New York since 1991. We learned how, when his nest was torn down, many people protested and since then his home on a building on Fifth Avenue has been undisturbed.
We then watched the trailer of the documentary made about his life so far and you can watch it here:
You can also keep up to date with what is happening in his nest from this site, palemale.com.
This past week, ELC library classes were delighted with Little Quack written by Lauren Thompson and illustrated by Derek Anderson. There were plenty of mathematical concepts to explore in this endearing story of courage.
We then made our own ducklings and mother duck, similar to these, out of felt and sung the song Five little ducks.
This past week all ELC and Elementary library classes have read the same book, Truck Stuck by Sallie Wolf and illustrated by Andy Robert Davies. This clever picture book written with minimal rhyming text shows how all of us, especially young people, can come up with very clever ideas to solve problems.
To understand how trucks can get stuck under bridges we watched this video:
We’re pretty sure they didn’t think about taking the air out of the truck’s tyres!
While ELC classes went on to make truck pictures using coloured shapes similar to this example the Elementary classes were frustrated by this video (passed on by Mr Loste):
If only they had used their brains to solve the problem!
Talking of using our brains to solve problems, we then went on to enjoy some stories from George Shannon’s Stories to Solve series. These were hugely popular and we had a turn at acting out the story of the boatman, goat, wolf and cabbage.
We also got to look at our fantastic collection of scanimation books mostly by Rufus Butler Seder, and looked at how scanimations are made and watched this clever idea for a coffee table and mat:
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