Lower Elementary Reading Loft
This week we confronted some problems in the Lower Elementary classroom. Partner and small group reading has left many of our cozy cubes empty, but taking up much needed book storage and block area space. Some children’s are in the Lower Level cubbies and want to be higher, and children who have higher cubbies want to be lower. Some children have bigger cubbies, but everyone is growing out of the small spaces! Children have become such good friends, and want to read together in flexible groupings and this is hindered by the separation across the classroom.
“What if we had a reading loft?” generated a lively group discussion that lead to research on the internet, concept drawings, and a proposal meeting with Ms. Courtney!
Some of the ideas presented were two ways of getting up and down, places for Dolce (our classroom parakeet to land), cozy spaces, rock wall, increased book storage, more block space, hidden tunnels, keeping the plants, and much more! Ms. Courtney approved our project with the condition that we document our progress, create a structure that will become a permanent part of the LE Classroom, research materials, incoperate the input from architects, builders, and our parent community, and make drawings and models to scale! We heard the good news today, and we will get started right away!
Library Finished!
With the help of many LE Students, led by some of our second year students, we finished labeling and inputting our entire collection of “learning to read” books by the Guided Reading Levels A to P! We used a program called BookBuddy to scan all the barcodes so we now have a searchable library of over 300 titles. Herbie was instrumental in discovering to solutions to problems… books with no barcodes, adding pictures of each cover, and how to share the list on the “cloud”. He then went home and purchased the App with his own money so that he could scan his own library collection! Thanks Herbie!
Ms Jen's & Ms. Lisa's Classroom Blog 