Washington Children's Choice voting this week!

All K-3 classes are reviewing the twenty picture books we read for the Washington Children's Choice Picture Book Award, and students are voting using a Google Form while they are finding and checking out books.  It works well for 1st through 3rd grade, though Kindergarten voting is still done with a token to mark their choice.

I will tally up the votes and mail them off to the WLMA WCCPBA committee today, where they will be added to 100,000 other votes from around the state.  We should know the winner within a couple of weeks!  My prediction is Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes or Snow Dog's Journey from my students' reactions.

In 4th grade we are continuing to talk about the importance of reading in our lives.  This week we focused on how to find books that interest us in the nonfiction section by doing a quick survey of the subjects in the nonfiction section.

Students looked at titles within each hundred (000-099, 100-199, etc.) and inferred some subtopics included in that category.  I am entering them all into Wordle by group and we will continue the exercise next week.  In small groups, students will examine the most common topics and find ones they are interested in pursuing.  We will also discuss the "weird" things they found and questioned me about, including:

• "Why are graphic novels, poetry, fairytales and folktales in nonfiction?"
• "What does "Generalities" mean for the 000-099 range?"  
• "Why are biographies in 92 and collective biographies in 920?"

Here is the first Wordle word cloud for the 000-099 range, created from subjects the students found themselves: