Friday, November 13, 2015

Making the Connection: Inviting Parents to the Media Center

            Making the connection with parents is important part of the media specialist job. The natural assumption is yes, the media specialist supports reading. However it is important to be an active supporter and involve parents in creating a lifelong passion for reading.
           Today was the beginning of this mission for me.  We had our "Pete the Cat" Afternoon Reading Session today. I started off discussing websites for parents that provided strategies that they could use at home.  Then we introduced the book and I read and sang the story with the students help. I had so much fun. I was in full character, something I don't get to do on a regular basis with my classes due to time restraints.

 After reading the stories with the students I explained the stations to the students and the strategy behind the station to the parents. Then I had the students find their parents and pick a station to begin. 
             We had puppet making as our retell station. Watching the students and their parents connect as they created their Pete the Cat puppet was worth the entire session.  The students sang the story to the parents as they finished their puppets. This was by far the favorite of the group.                 
           Our next station was the sequencing station. This station worked on several skills in one, which included retell, beginning-middle-end, and sequencing the events of a story. They used story cards to glue them in order. This station can easily be duplicated by them just drawing or painting the events of the story at home. 
          The last station was a writing activity. They all were able to create a page in the book called, "We love our Shoes". This book will be in the media center for them to see when they visit.  This station also had a prediction part, where they had to predict what would happen if Pete stepped in grass, oranges, blackberries, or mustard seeds. 
             As the parents were leaving they thanked me for hosting this event and asked me when I was doing it again. I gladly told them that I was in the planning process of becoming the Pigeon from Mo Willems books. 
             

4 comments:

  1. Great ideas for Pete the Cat day! Our library is actually having an anniversary in February and we are also renting a Pete the Cat suit for a storytime. I love all of your ideas for making puppets, creating a retelling station, and a writing station about We Love our Shoes! I think it would be cool for the kids to make their own Pete the Cat shoe box guitar to play some Pete the Cat songs on! haha!

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  2. I LOVE Pete the Cat. He is one of my favorite. The parents and students had a blast. Making the Pete the Cat guitar would be fun, I will have to add that to my list of ideas for next year. Thank you.

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  3. So cute! I would LOVE to inclue something like this for one of our literacy or open house nights. Great info and insights.

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    1. Thank you Ashley. I am hoping to do four of these this year. I just did one on Mo Willems and invited the public library to join us. They did the read aloud for me. It was great. I blogged about that event also. It is one of the current post on this page.

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