Autumn in the library is always a crazy, busy, exciting time!  Despite my best intentions to blog about things I’m doing with my students or things I’ve created I seem to get side-tracked by our Literacy Night, then our Fall Festival, then our Book Fair, then Veteran’s Day….and before you know it, November is almost over! So…I thought I would take some time while I’m on our Thanksgiving break to catch you up on some of the fun things I’ve been doing with my students!

In October, we hosted our 5th Annual Storybook Pumpkin Patch in the library, an activity where students decorate a pumpkin to look like their favorite book character.  I first wrote about it here and then again here.   Over the years, I had begun to notice that many of the pumpkins submitted were the same character over and over again.   While I do believe there is nothing wrong with kids reading the same books, I wanted to try and encourage new books this year, and hopefully new pumpkin characters as well.

So, one of the first things I decided to do is combine our Storybook Pumpkin Patch with some informal book talks on the new books that they have been reading.  The week before we talked about our Storybook Pumpkin Patch, I had each class sit in a circle and share what books they were currently reading.  They could share why they picked it, what they liked about it, their favorite passage/part, or why they would recommend it to others.  (With the younger kids in Kinder and 1st, I had them share the new book they just checked out and talk about why they chose that book.)

While they shared, I wrote down the different types of characters the books were about (Wimpy Kid, Fly Guy, Pete the Cat, Fancy Nancy, etc.)  After everyone shared, we looked back at the list and talked about the diversity of the characters.   I used this an an opportunity to remind them that when they are reading, to look out for how the characters change throughout the telling of the story…these changes can often be tied to the THEME of the story.   (I used the poster on the left with the younger grades and the poster on the right with the upper grades and had them help me fill in example themes.)

On their next visit, we talked about the Storybook Pumpkin Patch and we looked back on the list of characters from their book talks as we watched our pumpkin videos from the past year. Right away, kids could point out the characters that showed up often in the video. I reminded them to think back on our booktalks from last week, and encouraged them to do a character from a book they really enjoyed that may not have been done before.   Then, I gave them a copy of the Storybook Pumpkin Plan and had them work together to brainstorm characters that they may want to do this year.  Then they brainstormed materials they could use and drew out their plan.

I was really excited to see the enthusiasm from the kids, and we ended up with the highest participation this year!  160 pumpkins, from PreK to 5th grade! 🙂  We also had a much more diverse pumpkin selection, and it was so much fun hearing the conversations about books between the students!  Here are a some of our more creative pumpkins this year!

Clark the Shark                           Digger the Dinosaur                           Dragons Love Tacos

Narwhal, Unicorn of the Sea              Eva from Owl Diaries                             The Ugly Duckling

The Storybook Pumpkin Patch Planning Sheet is now a part of the Storybook Pumpkin Patch Activity that you can find here at my TpT store.   When we come back after Thanksgiving break, I plan on having my students do more official book talks using FlipGrid so that they can share them with each other.  My next project is to create some talking point signs to put up on a chart stand to help my kids with ideas on things they can use for their booktalks!  Be watching for that post soon!

If you blog and also have a full time job, I’d love to hear your ideas on how to keep up with everything! LOL