Whitestone Elementary Library

Fourth and fifth graders at Whitestone will be completing a GIS (geographic information system) activity that will give them insight into patterns of animal species.

This activity can be found at the Geography Action website.

Students can use the following online gis application to complete the first part of the activity.

Animal Habitats Viewer

Using the animal habitats viewer students can choose a land animal, choose a color, then click on the countries where that animal is found. The students use the data provided by National Geographic.

Mammal Data Chart

Then the students can compare their map to the map of Protected Land Areas and answer the following questions from the Mapping Europe Toolkit:
• How many of the mammals are endangered or threatened?
• Which land mammals’ ranges live in the northern parts of Europe? In the
southern part? Are there some that only live in the east or west?
• Is there a pattern or relation between the countries that have a lot of protected
areas and the number of mammals—including endangered and threatened—
that can be found there?
• Why do you think these countries are protecting these land and
marine areas?

Happy belated GIS day!

Whitestone Elementary students will celebrate Geography Awareness Week by making world geography themed items to display during the book fair. The book fair theme is “Destination: Book Fair, Read Around the World!”

Kindergarten and First grade students will be making flags from various countries around the world. Second and third graders will be making paper models of different clothing worn around the world. Fourth and fifth graders will be using an online GIS (Geographic Information System) application to map various animals that live in Europe.

Finally all grade levels can play the Friends of World Heritage Travelpod game. Print out your highest score and send it to the library by Friday. There will be prizes awarded for each grade level.

Please join us in celebrating this year’s Geography Awareness Week theme, Get Lost in Mapping: Find Your Place in the World.

Tuesday the support team will take the teachers through a host of ideas to use with buddy classes this school year. We will be using my favorite method of delivering staff development… stations! At my station teachers will learn about the following online resources.

World Book Kids Activities is an online collection of simple directions for art projects, science experiments, and pencil and paper activities.

http://www.artsconnected.org/toolkit/index.html
This site contains an online interactive toolkit students can explore to learn more about line, color, and balance and see examples in authentic works of art.

http://www.spellingcity.com/
Students can enter 2-10 (or more) words they are having difficulty spelling. Then they can play interactive games to help learn how to spell the words. Some of the games are printable.

http://www.mightybook.com/
http://www.storyplace.org/sp/eel/eel.asp
Students can work on fluency using these online stories and rhymes.

Virtual Author Visits
Authors offer free virtual visits via Skype, Apple’s iChat or Google Video and Voice!  The first one I’m trying to arrange is Gwendolyn Zepeda. She’s from Houston, I saw her presentation at TLA last year and she is hysterical. Some of her books are YA and adult, but she has a couple of picture story books too.
http://www.gwendolynzepeda.com/index.html

Webcomics
http://loyaltyliberty.com/
An online graphic novel about the American War of Independence
http://www.drewweing.com/pup/
“Pup” – A philosophical dog, two childish cats and their views of the world. “Pup” is a series of short pieces, and is updated with new stories intermittently.
http://www.venisproductions.com/angelmoxie/archives/0/0/001.html
Angel Moxie is the tale of three Junior High School girls and their quest to save the Earth from evil demons from another dimension.

I learned about World Book online resources today. I can’t wait to share them with teachers when they come back to school next week!