Are you ready to camp out with a good book?  This fall, we will be enjoying our tent, cozy fire, and s’more bookmarks while we read.  Please join us in the library for a chance to take a selfie with your favorite book!

Powered Libraries is an initiative of the Texas Library Association.  Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, has declared Thursday, September 15, 2016 as “Power Up at Your Library Day,” and it is a wonderful opportunity to showcase today’s library.  The modern library should be the heart of the school emphasizing student voice and providing opportunities for young people to tinker, create and explore.  Libraries have transformed into innovative centers of learning.  Here at White Oak Middle School, our media center strives to inspire students to become innovative learners who critically evaluate informational resources, solve problems creatively, and foster a lifelong love of reading.

Squishy Circuits

Book Club 2016

Makey Makey

Chibitronics

LittleBits

Check out the Power Up Toolkit!

Share how your library powers up! #poweredlibraries

“Just make a mark and see where it takes you.”

-Vashti’s Teacher, The Dot

Peter H. Reynolds wrote The Dot in 2003 and inspired young people everywhere to celebrate their creativity. Each year in September students around the world celebrate Dot Day by making global connections and creating works of art.  What are you creating for #DotDay?

Our students at WOMS celebrated by creating 3D dots with QuiverVision.  The QuiverVision Dot Day page is free to download and print for your students.  They can design their very own dot and bring it to life!  By viewing the students’ dots through the free QuiverVision app (iOS & Andriod), their works of art turn into 3D masterpieces.

Helping students learn how to navigate our digital world is a priority at White Oak Middle School.  We want to ensure every student has the opportunity to learn in a safe online environment. Through Common Sense Media, our sixth, seventh and eighth graders will participate in a curriculum designed to help students learn to make safe, responsible and respectful digital decisions. Beginning in September, students will start completing lessons in the Digital Passport  curriculum. The lessons are designed to educate students about cyberbullying, online messages, copyright infringement and effective ways to search for information online.  Please help support our digital citizenship initiative by asking your student to share the skills he/she is learning in the Digital Passport curriculum.  Help all of our students become Digital Citizenship Superheroes!

The White Oak Media Center welcomed students back to school this week. All sixth, seventh and eighth graders visited the library to check out books and receive a chromebook (if they did not receive one during registration). We caught lots of readers! Who will we catch next?

The Roughneck Readers met today and started reading The Thirteenth Goldfish by Jennifer Holm.

“What if you and your grandfather were the same age?  Ellie has never liked change. She misses fifth grade. She missed her old best friend. She even misses her dearly departed goldfish. Then one day a strange boy shows up. He’s bossy. He’s cranky. And weirdly enough…he looks a lot like Ellie’s grandfather, a scientist who’s always been slightly obsessed with immortality.  Could this gawky teenager really be Grandpa Melvin? Has he finally found the secret to eternal youth?”

—The Fourteenth Goldfish by Jennifer Holm

Welcome Back to School!

Learning never stops for our students at White Oak Middle School.  Summer is a wonderful time to pick up a book and read, invent something new and create lots of summer fun.  Thanks to Wonderopolis and Scholastic books, we were able to give our students a gift to help them have an awesome summer vacation. Scholastic donated over eight hundred new books.  Every student received one or more of the following titles:

The Penderwicks on Gardam Street by Jeanne Birdsall

Scat by Carl Hiassen

Maggie Bean Stays Afloat by Tricia Rayburn

The Secret Identity of Devon Delaney by Lauren Barnholdt

Blown Away by Joan Hiatt Harlow

The 39 Clues by Peter Lerangis

War Horse by Michael Morpurgo

Skeleton Creek by Patrick Carmen

Each student received information about Camp Wonderopolis from our friends at the National Center for Families Learning.

Keeping kids and their families learning together throughout the summer and out-of-school time, Camp Wonderopolis can help build vocabulary, background knowledge in science, reading comprehension, critical thinking, and other literacy skills along the way.

The best part was meeting with every student and wishing them well for the next year.  We will miss our eighth graders as they advance to high school, and we will see our current sixth and seventh graders next year. Happy reading!

Have you met Lunch Lady? She serves up justice and lunch!  Friday, May 6th is Lunch Lady Superhero Day based on the famous Lunch Lady book series by Jarrett J. Krosoczka.  On this day, we honor our cafeteria workers and their dedication to our students.  Our students signed aprons, and gave each of our cafeteria ladies a copy of the book Lunch Lady and the Cyborg Substitute. 

Sixth, seventh & eighth grade students signed all the aprons.

Each of our awesome lunch ladies received a copy of Jarrett J. Krosoczka’s book.

WOMS library assistants and Mrs. Stewart’s class shared their appreciation with our lunch ladies.

WOMS loves our cafeteria ladies!

Why school lunch ladies are heroes by Jarrett. J Krosoczka.

Do you love inventing, tinkering and creating? So do we! The Great Maker Challenge was an opportunity for our students to use their imagination and critical thinking skills to create a Rube Goldberg inspired machine.

To get inspired, the students watched Audri’s Rube Goldberg Monster Trap Machine.

Teams of students were given a set of supplies and a task to begin.

All teams received the same set of supplies. And…yes, the cardboard box counted as a supply!

To begin, students designed their machines. The teams created drawings and blueprints to guide them. The goal was to build a machine that would pop a balloon. Simple, right?

Next, the fun began as students made their ideas come to life. They constructed, adjusted and troubleshooted any problems that arose.

Peace, Love & Inventing!

Car made from a domino box, cardboard and straws!

The students had the opportunity to show off their machines to real life engineers. Terrence Kelley and Jeramy Hayes took the time to visit with every team and offer their advice.

After all the construction, the moment of truth came. Would their machines work?

“Failure is not an option.”  Apollo 13

We even had a home entry from our friends the Curry Family!

Thanks to all our wonderful teams who spent their lunch time imagining, creating, solving problems, tinkering, and exploring their capabilities! The teams will have the opportunity to show off their machines at the Global Maker Day virtual event on May 17th.