Library Programs & Events
As part of a districtwide STEAM initiative, our campus was provided with brand new LEGO Essential Spike coding kits! The LEGO Education website provides building directions, teacher lesson plans, and block coding tools. Students will get to build and then program their creation to move, light up, or make sounds via Bluetooth connection. PTO volunteers partnered with me to start the process of setting up the LEGO kits. All teachers got a hands-on opportunity to build and code with these kits before introducing their students to them.
All grade levels are invited to use the STEAM lab as a flexible space for innovative teaching and learning.
The STEAM club worked their way through a "certification" process in order to qualify to be on Slaughter's STEAM Team. STEAM Team members were eligible to help other grade levels with their LEGO STEAM lessons.
Our 5th Readers as Leader Club is made up of 5th graders who signed up to volunteer one recess day per week to read with 2nd graders. Reading buddies played games, read poems, readers theater scripts, fiction and informational books, and more!
At Slaughter, we aim to make reading fun and engaging. This was one of many creative library programs hosted throughout the year at Slaughter. Throughout the month of November, students and staff at Slaughter Elementary were encouraged to have some fun with books in our library and throughout the school by creating a “bookface.” A bookface is created by holding up the cover of a book in a way that completes the cover image with your own body. Students and staff could submit their book face creations in many ways, and many pictures were celebrated on our daily morning announcement broadcast. Use our school’s hashtag to see more posts on X: #itsaslaughterthing
The "Read Around the World" program is an engaging reading initiative designed to introduce all students in Kindergarten through fifth grade to the diverse people, places, cultures, religions, animals, and habitats from across the globe. Using the seven continents as a framework, students explore books grouped by region and work to earn stamps for their Read Around the World passports—either printed or digital. This program happens each January in conjunction with Multicultural Children's Book Week, which is the last Friday in January. As students check out books from the library, they can pick up a passport. When they return their library book(s), they can collect stamps from the different continents.
Teachers voted on the amazing entries for the library bookmark design contest! Students from all grades created bookmarks to show what makes our library special. The designs were colorful, creative, and fun to see. After all the votes were counted, Julie from 5th grade was chosen as the winner! She won a gift card to spend at the book fair, and her bookmark was copied for all Slaughter students to pick up in the library.
We hosted the 10th annual Recycled Art Contest, celebrating Earth Day. This year's contest theme was STEAM: science, technology, engineering, and math. Students were challenged to create STEAM-related projects using recyclable materials in accordance with the City of McKinney guidelines. Check out the winning projects from each grade level in the video below.