read – KPBSD Communications Field Notes

Preventing Summer Slide #read

Preventing Summer Slide
Summer Slide? No, not the slide at the playground or the water park. Not the Slip ‘N Slide from days gone by either. Summer Slide refers to the time period when kids are not in school and things they have learned slip from their minds. One area commonly affected is reading.
Scholastic suggests the following in the article Three Ways to Prevent Summer Slide.

Six books to summer success. – Research shows that reading as few as six books can help prevent loss of reading skills.
Read something every day.
Keep reading aloud. – Yes, even to teens!

Since our school libraries are not open during the summer, students will need other options when looking for books to read. Many of our communities have awesome public libraries with summer reading programs. If you live in an area with a public library, please visit often during the summer break.
If you do not have access to a public library, several digital options are available for readers:

OVERDRIVE

All KPBSD staff and students (Gr. 6-12) have access to our shared Overdrive collection. This collection includes over 2,000 titles in ebook or audiobook format. Titles can be accessed through a browser on a computer at this website: KPBSD Overdrive Collection.
How to use Overdrive video.
There is also a free Overdrive App available for iOS and Android devices. Make sure to choose the KPBSD Schools (Main Collection) when searching for our Overdrive Library.
KPBSD students login with ID number and regular password. KPBSD staff members login using eNumber (change the E to a 9) and regular password.

SYNC

This is a free summer audiobook program for teens 13+. Beginning April 26, 2018, SYNC will give away two complete audiobook downloads a week through July 25. That amounts to 26 FREE audiobook downloads! Visit the SYNC website for more information. https://audiobooksync.com/ Anyone interested can sign up through email or text. This is an amazing deal!

PEBBLE GO

PG is an award-winning database for reading and research written especially for elementary students. Information can be found related to animals, science, biographies, and social studies. Images, video, maps, activities, and games are also included. Pebble Go also has a read-aloud feature and a built in glossary. This great resource can be found here: https://www.pebblego.com/.
KPBSD student login for summer is as follows: Username: 9999 / Password: jkl
No matter where you go to find books, the most important part is to keep reading!
Thank you to Karla Barkman, KPBSD Librarian and Technology Coach, for contributing this story. Do you have a story tip or idea?

Battle of the Books #BOB2018

KPBSD Battle of the Books

Students of the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District have been participating in Battle of the Books (BOB) for 33 years. The original idea for BOB came from a radio program sponsored by the Chicago Public Library in the 1940s. A school librarian from Illinois, Joanne Kelly, took the idea and used it in her library. Years later the idea came to Alaska with Ros Goodman, a former Illinois librarian, on her way to Kodiak. The idea was piloted by a few Alaskan schools and by the 1984-1985 school year 26 districts were involved. KPBSD was one of those districts and had a state-winning team from Kenai Junior High that year.
KPBSD students, once again, competed valiantly in district and state battles. This year’s battles included 61 teams across four grade levels for students in grades 3-12. Students in grades K-2 can also participate, but only at the building level.
Battle of the Books is a statewide reading and comprehension program sponsored by the Alaska Association of School Librarians. The goals of the program are to encourage and recognize students who enjoy reading, broaden reading interests, increase reading comprehension, and promote academic excellence. All this is accomplished through a game-show style competition known simply as “BOB”.

Grades K-12 compete

Lists of books are chosen and questions are written for all the grade levels. Students read the books (12 titles for Grades 3-6 and 10 titles for Grades 7-12), quiz each other, learn title and author information, and compete in teams of no more than three students attempting to score as many points as possible answering questions related to the books. Battle questions all begin with the words, “In which book…”. Students are allowed thirty seconds to confer with team members and come up with an answer which is always the title and author of a book on the list.

Compete via videoconference

All KPBSD battles took place using Skype for Business to video conference. Students loved being able to “see” the competition. In addition to using Skype for battles, a Battle “Canvas” course was created where coaches accessed all needed battle materials and information and discussions took place. Google was used during battles to report scores and chat with Battle Central (Karla Barkman) when needed. Battle coaches were exposed to many different technologies again this year and did a fabulous job. Our KPBSD student battlers did an awesome job as well. District Battles were held in February with state battles in early March.

Congratulations to the following teams that made it to the final round of KPBSD district competition!

Grades 3 & 4

1st Place – Seward Elementary
2nd Place – Soldotna Connections
3rd Place – Aurora Borealis Charter School
4th Place – Tustumena Elementary

Grades 5 & 6

1st Place – West Homer Elementary
2nd Place (Tie) – Cooper Landing
2nd Place (Tie) – Fireweed
2nd Place (Tie) – Sterling Elementary

Middle School

1st Place – Homer Middle
2nd Place – Kenai Middle
3rd Place – Seward Middle
4th Place – Nikiski Middle

High School

1st Place – Cooper Landing
2nd Place (Tie) – Nikiski High
2nd Place (Tie) – Soldotna High
4th Place – Voznesenka School

State Battles were held the beginning of March. Each of our first place district teams went on to state competition and did a great job finishing! Congratulations to:

Seward Elementary (Grades 3 & 4) – 7th place out of 32 teams
West Homer Elementary (Grades 5 & 6) – 5th place out of 35 teams
Homer Middle (Middle School) – 3th place out of 27 teams
Cooper Landing (High School) – 7th place out of 20 teams

Battle of the Books 2018 photo album on Facebook

Book lists for next year’s battles were chosen by librarians, teachers, and battle coaches at a title selection workshop held during the State Library Conference before spring break. The new lists can be found at the State Battle of the Book’s website.
Article contributed by Karla Barkman, District Battle of the Books Coordinator.

Seventh graders personalize reading at Nikiski Middle High

“I’m very big on giving students as much choice as possible in their middle school years,” said Laura Niemczyk, Nikiski Middle-High School teacher. “I am also very big on turning kids into lifelong readers. With those two objectives in mind, I issued the 25 book challenge to my seventh graders this year. This is not a new idea—it comes from a modified version of Donalyn Miller “Book Whisperer” 40 book challenge. I was tired of fighting struggling readers on reading logs, fluent readers who hated reading after having done years of reading logs, and students who would tell me that they didn’t have time to read. Notice it’s a challenge, not an assignment. There was no mention of grades attached to it and when I introduced the challenge to students, not one asked me, “how much is this worth?” They had many questions: about the types of books they could read, about audio books, about books they wanted to reread, about reading on their devices. So now we read for chunks of each day’s class period. And it’s great.

I don’t consider it innovative when my classroom is full of students actively reading, and not looking up if someone enters the room. What’s better than I did before is that instead of having to assess students on written reading logs, I now meet students where they are at and provide them with multiple ways to show me what they know. We have class book talks, the students recommend books, write reviews, and engage in discussions on theme and characterization. Some of this I planned—once a week there are open ended prompts that are differentiated for student reading level and even book type. And they do them, without complaint, because they chose their book and choose how to respond. Some students write out their answers, others type, others draw, and some record an audio file.
Aspects of how this added innovation into our classroom came from the students. They are required to keep track of the books they have read. Once again I gave them options for this: a Pinterest board (it’s how I chose to do my reading challenge), Twitter, a written reading record form, chart in the classroom, discussion list on Canvas or through Goodreads.com. One student asked if she could record her answers in a blog; I said “yes!” That led to others asking if they could use LibraryThing.com and Shelfari.com to create their virtual book worlds. As always I said yes, and then asked them to show me what these things were.
In the last quarter, I learned A LOT about where kids like to go to share and talk about books, helped struggling readers learn that audio books are still reading (they can only “read” ten audio books for the challenge), and had some of the most authentic and informative reading conference-mini lessons of my teaching career—some of these have even occurred online in these new virtual book worlds the kids have created (and helped me to navigate). The students feel like they have a say in their education, we are doing things that make sense to them, and I am creating connections with my students.”
–Laura Niemczyk, Nikiski Middle-High School
#relevance #responsive #read #AKlearns
Personalized Learning in KPBSD

The 2017 Book Battles!

The winning KPBSD Battle of the Books teams will represent KPBSD at state battles the beginning of March!
#golden #AKlearns
Congratulations!
Grades 3- 4: Connections Homeschool
Grades 5- 6, and Middle School: Cooper Landing School
High School: Voznesenka School

Soldotna Connections 3-4 Grade Team — Grades 3 – 4 – Soldotna Connections

Cooper Landing Grades 5-6 — Grades 5 – 6 – Cooper Landing School

Voznesenka HS reading — High School – Voznesenka School