Throwback for the New Year

First off, Happy New Year!  (Or in teaching terms, Happy "You Made It Through The First Half of the Year!")  I decided to do a throwback to one of my more popular posts because I've been eyeing it for a while and want to add some updates about the content.

In 2014, I wrote about Between the Lions Online Stories from PBSKids.com and how I used it with kindergarten students for entertainment during morning duty.  Well...

The past couple of months, I've been racking my brain to come up with ideas to engage talkative students during transition time into the library.  Even if it was just certain classes, I decided it was a problem I needed to take responsibility for.

One day it just dawned on me...why don't I play short videos for my classes as they are coming in?!

I narrowed my video selections to Between the Lions Stories for K-2nd grade students and Full-Time Kid with Mya on Youtube for 3rd-5th grade.  I simply pull the video up on the screen before the class enters and ask the first student in line to walk in and press play.  As the rest of the class walks in, they are treated to a book read aloud or little experiments and activities that last no more than 5 minutes.  

I explained the idea to my students after they finished their first video and let them know that this was to help as they were coming into the library.  The majority seem to understand that this is beneficial and what is expected of them and have come in quietly so they could watch the video.  My older students will ask if we can try some of the ideas, such as make your own font.

Currently, the results have been very worthwhile and I will continue to use this transition activity.

Between the Lions Online Stories

One of my go to free resources for the kindergarten students that come into the library in the morning before the school day begins is virtual books projected on the Promethean Board.  I use several sites, but the one I want to talk about today is Between the Lions website via PBSKids.  These virtual books range between being actual animated stories to a well-done presentation of the illustrations from books.  They are as long as 40 seconds to about 6 minutes.  The nice thing is that once you hit "play" for one video in a category, it will end up playing the rest of the videos that come after it in the category. 

The site has the stories divided by 11 subjects, such as Folktales and Fables or Animals.  The students enjoy viewing the books because a lot of them are recognizable stories, such as The Three Little Pigs, Violet's Music by Angela Johnson, and Yo! Yes? by Chris Raschka. Funny enough, I'm constantly playing King Midas for them because it's characters are marionettes and they think it looks silly (and so is this version of the story). 

Did I mention this is available for free? ;-)


Image from Between the Lions webpage/pbskids.org