Mini Reading Fair

We are all so pleased and proud of the G/T students for their marvelous presentations for Mini Reading Fair this year! The event was extremely well-attended and well-received! Each venue presented to an average of 20 classes. I heard nothing but praise from our visitors! Students, staff, and parents were all very impressed with the work and public speaking they saw on display.
Please enjoy this brief video overview of the event:

MiniReadingFair from Kimberly Boyce-Quentin on Vimeo.
Project summaries:
1st grade - Play. Our 1st graders performed an adaptation of P.D. Eastman's classic Are You My Mother. Students worked very hard in rehearsals and (assisted by our 1st grade Panther Parent Partners!) created wonderful sets and costumes entirely from recycled/ re-purposed materials.
2nd grade - Robot Retells. 2nd grade G/T students selected stories suitable for re-enactment by the OZOBOT. This is a tiny robot with an optical sensor that can be programmed with physical colored code blocks as well as digitally! They created 3-D mixed-media sets and costumes from reused material and created coded tracks for the OZOBOTs to act out various tales. Students performed: 3 Billy Goats Gruff, Silly Sally, Frog & Toad, Goldilocks and the 3 Bears, Chicken Little, and 3 Little Bunnies.
3rd grade - Interactive Poetry. These students selected poems and created visual representations for each stanza or section. They next recorded themselves reading the poem and uploaded the voice and image files onto Scratch - an educational programming language developed by MIT. They used these files to write a program that would allow visitors to interact with their poem by touching the illustrations. The display was connected to the digital content via a Makey Makey. Touching the conductive material next to an image caused the program to zoom into that image and play the voice file of the student reading the verse that image represented.
4th grade - Story Silhouettes. The 4th grade selected a favorite novel and then had to choose a handful of key events that captured the essence of the whole story. They illustrated these scenes and used the images to create silhouette tableaux. Students re-purposed shoe, tissue, and cereal boxes for their display cases! The created windows and back-lit their images to display the silhouettes by wiring recycled Christmas lights into the back of the box. They constructed their circuits with one or two switches to illuminate each section of the their box as they retold the book.
5th grade - Book Tours. Our 5th graders each selected a favorite book and created a mixed-media, 3-D version using re-purposed materials. There were some very imaginative versions! They then mounted the "book" to the Main Hallway wall and gave their visitors a "tour" of the novel via their illustrations and summaries!
Again, congratulations to our students on a very successful first Expo! We are all looking forward to Mini Science Fair next month!