I LOVE DOT DAY!!
Dot Day is on September 15th, but instead of just doing one day of celebrating, I’ve decided to do a whole 6 days of celebrating! Why you may ask? Well..it’s due to our schedule changes for this year. Instead of having teachers sign up for a weekly time slot to bring their class to the library, the library is now part of the Specials rotation. This means that students will rotate over 6 days to all the Specials classes.
Day #1 = PE
Day #2 = Art
Day #3 = PE
Day #4 = Performing Arts (Music and Theater Arts combined)
Day #5 = PE
Day #6 = Library
Change can be scary, but I was actually pretty excited about being able to have the students for 50 minutes instead of the 30 minutes I normally got. Plus, now I’m guaranteed only 6 classes each day, with a lunch AND a conference time! One major downside is that I only see classes every 6 days instead of every week. I am working on some solutions for reminding kids to bring their books back as their library day will fall on a different day each time. I am also still trying to work out how I’m going to do Book Fairs AND have classes…but that topic is for another post!
Anyway, back to the amazing DOT DAY! When you join here, you get access to a plethora of ideas for activities. I did a lot of those last year, so this year I wanted to find some new things to try. Pinterest again proved to be invaluable! 🙂
A Zen Librarian had a great blog post about Dot Day but unfortunately, her blog has moved or is now no longer available. 🙁 I used some of her ideas and created station signs and directions. I had all 8 stations available for 3rd-5th grade, but limited the number of stations for Kinder – 2nd grade to help myself manage everything!
- Kinder really had a lot of fun with Station #2
- 1st grade rotated between Station #1 and Station #2.
- 2nd grade chose between Station #1, Station #2, and Station #6.
I put out hot dots and let students take one and place it anywhere on their paper. Then they used that dot to create a new picture of something. The Busy Librarian had a great poem to use with this activity that you can find here. The kids had a great time being creative. I had drawings of trees, aliens, baseball player, a shark, and even a clown holding a bouquet of balloons.
Students went absolutely crazy with this station! They loved the final look and said it reminded them of Tye-Dye! Two 4th graders even tried an experiment to see if their pictures would turn out differently. One decided to “grow” each of the 5 dots at the same time. The other “grew” one dot at a time. I won’t give away the surprise in case you want to try it on your own!
Even though we’ve done this last year, the kids still had fun making their own “dot” pictures, and then they took turns using the iPad to watch their picture “come to life” using the Quiver App! You can download the coloring page here.
I put copies of the Morse Code Alphabet around each computer, and then underneath, students could take a practice page to try their hand in writing in Morse Code. I even had some 5th grade boys that were so into this station that they spent their entire time here! But boy were they excited when they were able to figure out one of the mystery words on the Advanced level at DitDah! (Updated 9/9/2016: It looks like they have taken down this website activity for now. I’m investigating to see if it is going to return but in the meantime, you can also go to Morse Code Machine hosted by BoysLife.org.
You can find copies of the Morse Code Alphabet here plus an activity page here from Scholastic’s website here.
This station wasn’t as big of a hit as I hoped it would be, but several kids did go over to explore the books I ordered in Braille from The Braille Superstore. Everyone who tried to “read” the book “The Cat in the Hat” all left saying “Wow! That is hard!” The Zen Librarian also has some great handouts for this station including the Braille alphabet and an activity sheet for students to try writing in Braille.
I am super excited about this Station, and think it will actually last throughout the year. There are SO many cool things when you search for “dot trees” on Pinterest (see link here) but not enough time to do them all! So I chose this one from Mrs. Picasso’s Art Room here. I thought it would be cool to paint a tree trunk for each grade level in our cafeteria, and prepaint large colored circles. Then, each year, let students create smaller circles to staple on top of the painted ones, so that each student could “make their mark” on our school. Our counselor even got involved and had the students write a goal they wanted to accomplish in their circles. I may not get enough to do one per grade level, but maybe I’ll get at least 1 tree done this year! 🙂
I love the Aboriginal Hand Art, and thought this would be a great addition to our Dot Day stations this year! I had a friend that introduced me to this type of artwork when she sent me a postcard from Australia with examples on it. I looked on Pinterest, and found even more examples to show the students. Needless to say, this was a HUGE hit during our Dot Day Celebrations, and we had to put a timer for 10 minutes at this station!
I loved watching the students creativity at the Seurat bookmark station. I found small round dowels at Hobby Lobby, and also had long toothpicks for the students to create their own Pointilism masterpieces! Another great hit!
To help manage everything that was going on, I had each student check out books first and place their library books in a line by the exit door. As they finished a station, they simply placed their artwork/activity on top of their book and then went to a different station. I gave them the option to stay and finish a station, or if they wanted to do as many as possible, they were allowed to take their unfinished work with them to finish at another time. This system worked really well with all grade levels!
Another “aha” moment I had was with my 2 paint stations. On the first day, I used clear cups to put the paint in, but the q-tips were the same size, and so the top of the q-tip kept getting paint all over it. Plus, at the end of the day, I had to scoop the leftover paint back into the paint bottles which was a pain. So, in a dream, I remembered that I had all these empty play-doh containers (because I never throw anything away…you never know when you can re-use it)! These containers were the perfect size as the q-tip was about an inch taller than the container. Plus, I could put the lids on and keep the paint fresh for the next day! I love it when ideas work! If you’d like to purchase these stations signs so that you can do your own Dot Day Celebration Stations, you can get there at my TpT Store.
So, this was our Dot Day Celebration! What kinds of activities did you do to celebrate? I’d love to hear your ideas!
Sandy
Wow! Great ideas here! Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for sharing all your great ideas! The link above to the Dit-Dah site is a bit unclear. Is there an activity on the NSA site for kids to listen to morse code? What did they do on computers for this station?
Thank you!
Hi Nancy,
It looks like they have taken the Dit-Dah game down or have moved it to someplace that I’m not able to find. I did find another game that is similar here at http://boyslife.org/games/online-games/575/morse-code-machine/ . I will go in and update the blog post with this information and if I find the link for the Dit-Dah site I will update it also. Thanks! 🙂