Free eBooks Sites

If you're like me, you never seem to have enough copies of the popular books in your media center, but probably don't have the funds to invest in more copies.  I have recently come across 2 ebooks sites that are free to educators and offer some of the more popular books.

Epic is an ebook site that is free to educators.  It's just $4.99 per month for other uses.  Epic! has over 10,000 titles for K-12.  It is web based, but also has an App Store and Google Play app available.  The educator account includes 36 individual profiles so that you can customize the app for each of your students. This wouldn't necessarily work in the media center, but you could set up a profile for each grade level and put books appropriate for those levels in those profiles.

Check out some of the books that are offered on Epic in these screenshots:

The sports cars, military, and dog and cat pet books are always checked out in my media center.  Now students can access even more of these types of books on Epic!

 You find out more about Epic! HERE and find out more about Epic for Educators HERE.

Zing! is a free ebook site for educators, parents and students. 

Educators can assign specific books to students.

Zing even has a resources page for educators which includes reading, writing, grammar, pd, and books resources.  I love the selection of non-fiction that Zing! offers.

You can even search Zing! by guided reading, Lexile or ATOS level to find books.

Zing! even provides video tutorials to help you use Zing! more effectively.  

You can find out more about Zing! HERE.

For even more ebook sites, check out THIS past Book Bug post.

Are there any ebook sites that you love?

Love Our Little School!

Our visit from the AdvancED team member yesterday went very smoothly. Everyone was on their best behavior and our school truly shined.  I am so blessed to be a Moreland Wildcat.  There's no place I'd rather be!

Happy Groundhog Day!

Today we are being visited by a member of the AdvancED team as part of our county's accreditation process.  On top of that, we are possibly going to be getting some severe weather this afternoon.

Fun times.  Let's hope this day is not like the Bill Murray Groundhog Day movie and doesn't repeat itself over and over.

To make the day a little more fun, I am planning to read Groundhog Day by Gail Gibbons with my kinders and firsties.

And then we are going to play a Kahoot! using the iPads. 

I found a Kahoot! already created that goes with Groundhog Day by Gail Gibbons. Score!  You can play it HERE.

If you haven't checked out Kahoot!  I highly recommend it.  It's super easy to create a quiz and the kids love it.  Kahoot! is easy enough for kinders to play, but fun and engaging enough for even adults.  Who doesn't love a good competition?

I also created THIS little activity sheet for students to color while they wait their turn to go to the shelves. You can download it for free HERE.

Here's hoping that spring is just around the corner.

Super Bowl Fun

                        Call Number Sorting Center                                 Shelf Order Center

With the Super Bowl coming up next weekend, I brought out these fun shelf order centers last week.

These Call Number Puzzles from Jennifer Siderius also make for a fun center.  At least one puzzle has a sports theme.

We played a game of Minute to Win It to see if they could sort the cards in one minute.  It made it really fun.  Not too many finished, but they all enjoyed it.  I used the fact that not many finished to point out the importance of using a shelf marker to keep books in order otherwise they could end up like a big unorganized mess...like their sorting cards were before they put them in order.

You can find these DEMCO book-stops HERE.

I retaught students about the sports and leisure genre and reminded them where the non-fiction sports books and biographies are.  I also book talked some of the fiction sports books we have in our collection.

Although it is usually a pretty popular non-fiction section, the 700s were even more heavily checked out last week.  Hopefully that trend will continue.  Sometimes it just takes a little reminder.

We also just received a shipment of 170 new non-fiction books.  I will be working frantically to get them shelf ready and into my patrons' hands as soon as possible.

Always a fun time in the media center! What's going on in your media center this week?