We are excited to present the HHCS Usborne Read-a-Thon for the second year! Your child received a package on Friday for this amazing opportunity. Blast into reading and support the HHCS library while building your child’s personal home library as well! Usborne has an amazing selection of fiction and non-fiction as well as activity books and puzzles.
Just before the Christmas break we had a wonderful and cozy day to celebrate Jolabokaflod- the Icelandic tradition of the ‘Christmas book flood’. We enjoyed lots of reading and yummy hot chocolate. Thank you to all the guest readers who volunteered as well as those who helped to serve the drinks!
The new issue of the student-run newspaper, The Moose News, is here! Take a look, you can read it here online. There are lots of fun and informative articles for you to read!
Thank you to all who brought in a book-related Christmas ornament that they made for the library! It was so fun to look at these every day!
The new Storywalk is up! Come and check it out the next time you are at school- go for a walk through our wetlands!
Wishing you all a blessed Christmas with lots of cozy reading time!
I am looking for volunteers! Do you like to read? Do you like Christmas? Do you like kids? We are looking for parent volunteers to guest read to classes on Thursday, Dec. 21 for a special celebration of JOLABOKAFLOD- the Icelandic tradition of ‘flooding’ with books on Christmas Eve! We will be reading in different ways and enjoying hot chocolate and pajamas. Please email Mrs. B. if you can help out- L.Baillargeon@hh-cs.org. Check out this article to learn more about Jolabokaflod!
Thank you to all students who brought in an ornament for the Christmas tree in the library! A name will be drawn for a prize this week and students may come to collect their ornaments back on Wednesday or Thursday. Here are some pictures I thought I’d share of Christmas in the Library.
I am also excited to announce the first issue of HHCS Moose News- a student newspaper written by a small group of students that I work with! I have set up its own blog site to keep all the issues together digitally, but we will also print a few copies for each classroom at school. Please read and enjoy with your children. If any of your kids would like to contribute a guest article for our next issue, please let me know! Here is the link to the newspaper blog and the first issue.
How many of these classic Christmas books have you read with your kids? Give some of them a try this season! I’ve included some here with original type of covers and some as updated versions.
Barnesandnoble.com
polarexpress.com
Goodreads.com
Goodreads.com
Goodreads.com
Goodreads.com
Goodreads.com
These next 2 are not technically Christmas books but they definitely feel like they should be read during the Christmas season!
Penguinrandomhouse.com
Don’t forget the last day to bring in a Christmas ornament for the library tree is Friday Dec. 16!
Try out some of these book-related Christmas activities before and during the holidays! And of course, don’t forget students can make something for our library Christmas tree! Due date for those who would like to participate is December 16.
Hi everyone! Just a quick post this week to show some of the awesome book-related Christmas ornaments various students made for our library Christmas tree. I have so enjoyed seeing students stop in throughout the day to check on the tree to see the new ornaments that were appearing. It was a great community-building project- thank you everyone, I love them! Have a very Merry Christmas!
Barley and Birch has a great list of Christmas books that are about trees! I have been reading Red and Lulu to the primary classes and using it to also have the students learn a little bit about the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and about cardinals.
As I am teaching a primary music class this year, I have also been finding ways to use picture books in music class. We have been using music from The Nutcracker lately for class activities. Enjoy these Nutcracker-related Christmas books!
This week I am featuring an author focus on Arnold Ytreeide! HHCS students in grades 4 and up are very familiar with Mr. Ytreeide’s books. In grades 4,5, and 6, the classes rotate reading a different Christmas-themed book of Mr. Ytreeide’s for each year that they are in the junior division. This year all of grades 4,5, and 6 are reading Bartholomew’s Passage! I am teaching grade 6A Bible this year and we are really enjoying this book, set in the time that Jesus was born. Mr. Ytreeide’s 4 Christmas-themed books can be read during the Advent season and have short devotional reflections at the end of each chapter. These stories are adventurous, funny, and thoughtful. The students love being surprised by the recurring characters’ appearances and by the many dramatic twists and turns in Mr. Ytreeide’s writing.
In spring of 2020, as we moved into our first lockdown of the pandemic with online learning, I wrote to Mr. Ytreeide, who was so kind as to send us a personalized video to say hello to the students. I then had the students come up with some questions to ask Mr. Ytreeide about being an author and about his books and he sent a video message back again to us answering those questions. He also sent us some of his Mike Danford books (see below) for our library. It was so great for our students to be in contact with an author whose writing they really appreciated!
Amon’s Adventure is going to have a sequel, published in 2022! Apparently there have also been some conversations about having one of Mr. Ytreeide’s books made into a movie one day! Which book do you think should be the first to be a movie??
Check out this interview with Mr. Ytreeide on one of my favourite reading websites- The Read Aloud Revival!
Mr. Ytreeide also writes other types of books besides his Advent series and the Amon books. We have the first 3 books of the Mike Danford series in our school library, and the number 5 book just came out!
Here are some articles from Read Brightly about some book-ish Christmas activities! Some great ideas here for making book-themed Christmas ornaments! Don’t forget to start working on your ornaments for our library Christmas tree, HHCS! Have a great week!
