Holy Bagumba! I have great news! I just found out that one of my favorite Kate DiCamillo stories, Flora and Ulysses, has been made into a movie and will be streaming on Disney+ starting February 19^th. You know what that means…it’s time for a book club. Just like we did for Artemis Fowl and The One and Only Ivan, we’re going to offer a zoom book club. I’ll read the story in installments on zoom. If you have your own copy of the book, you can read along, if not, you can just listen in. Then we’ll have a final zoom meeting once people have had a chance to see the movie on Disney+ so that we can discuss it. The club is open to all grades, but Kate DiCamillo does love to use higher-level vocabulary, so it might be a more challenging listen for our younger friends.

Flora and Ulysses was awarded the Newbery Medal for the “most distinguished contribution to American literature for children” in 2014. It’s a quirky story of a comic book-loving girl (who says things like “Holy Bagumba!”) and a squirrel who gets sucked into a vacuum cleaner and emerges with superpowers!

Just like last time, here’s how we’ll proceed…I’ve already made a Google Classroom. If you are interested in joining us, send me an email at dabbott@westgenesee.org. I’ll send you the code for the classroom. Once you join the classroom, you’ll have access to the zoom login. Once our readers assemble we’ll announce reading sessions. I’m hoping to start reading on Monday, February 8^th.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me. I hope to hear from you soon!

Mrs. Abbott

 

Happy New (calendar) Year!

It is so nice to be back in the building after Christmas Break and we’re glad to be visiting classrooms again. Library classes are right back into their routines. We have started a research project about New York State in 4th-grade.  3rd-grade classes are exploring folktales, fables, and myths. 2nd-grade is learning to find and request books that they really want from our library catalog. 1st-grade and Kindergarten are learning about Caldecott award-winning picture books.

Now that we're back for the New Year, the library staff would like to ask for help returning overdue books. We still have quite a lot of books out from last spring when we went remote. This year, since we’ve been working from carts, we’ve been a little more lenient about letting books go out when students have overdue items. We also haven’t been sending out weekly reminders, so some students are falling behind on book returns. If your student has overdue books, please help them locate them. Books can be returned to your student’s teacher even if it’s not a library day. We’d love to get these student accounts cleaned up and the books back on the shelves so they can circulate. If you have any questions about overdue books, feel free to email me at dabbott@westgenesee.org.

Don't forget to READ4FUN!!!

Mrs. Abbott