Our Hackergal club had a great time our kick-off event, Hackergal Day, at Isfeld! There were around 60 girls from around the district who got together to watch the live event, be inpired, and started to learn how to code using Lynx! 
We will be meeting once a week this year, to continue to learn how to code in preperation for the Hackathon where we will be coding a project with a theme of helping our planet!

Ms. Hutchison's Grade 1 class read How to Catch an Elf and then designed and built there own Elf Traps! 
They had to be creative with recycled materials, sketch their ideas and then build their designs! There were so many great ideas, and great collaboration between group members!
​

Some classes missed out on International STEM Day on November 8th, so we had another Brooklyn STEM Day! We completed STEM challenges in the Library Learning Commons. 
Our challenge was to build the tallest tower possible using only 50 cups and 50 popsicle sticks, and the cups were not allowed to touch each other!
Students worked on their collaboration skills, creative and critical thinking, as well as their perserverance when plans didn't work out!

Many classes have been learning to code using Ozobots! Ozobots are little robots that follow lines. Students are able to code the ozobots using markers, different colour combinations make the ozobots do different things. 
Once we learned the basics, we used our ozobots to create and retell stories!

Thanks to all of you, our book fair was a great success!!! We loved seeing how excited all of our learners were to get new books (and other fun things). We were able to raise $3000 in scholastic rewards to redeem for new books and other library supplies!
A big thank you to our parent volunteers - we couldn't have done it without you! :)

Several classes from grade 2 - 7 had the opportunity to visit our cozy 'Reading Cafe' where they 'tasted' books in different genres and found books that were interesting and a good fit!
We spent 3 minutes with a book at each table, taking a look at the front and back covers, reading the blurb, and read a few pages.

We were able to secure a donation of new (to us) leather couches to transform a section of our library learning commons into a cozy reading area! Our learners have been loving them.

When students come to the library, they have lots of options for activities. They can:

• Read (of course!)
• Work on a puzzle
• Colour on our collaborative colouring page
• Look for new books
• Search the dictionary for our 'Word of the Week'

Kindergarten and Grade 1 classes have been learning to code using Bluebots! Bluebots are simple robots that have arrow buttons on top. Students press arrows in a sequence (or algorithm) to get their bluebots where they need to go! We experimented with building obstacle courses, planning out our algorithms, and of course 'debugging' our code when it wasn't quite right.