Summer = Reading @ FNE!

Camp Bluebonnet Scholarships

Mrs. Fournier is excited to announce that we will have our 6th Camp Bluebonnet on June 13-16 at Great Oaks Elementary.  You can register online through RRISD's Community Education department!  We've already filled up 15 of the 30 available spots, so register quickly if you're interested and going to be a 3rd-5th grader next year!

Mrs. Fournier, with the generous assistance of Ms. Jacobs, our principal, is offering 2 scholarships worth $99 to attend Camp Bluebonnet this summer!

To apply for the scholarship, please submit a persuasive essay on why you should be one of the two people chosen to attend camp on scholarships. Eligible students must be in 3rd-5th grades next year. Essays may be handwritten or typed but can only be on the front side of one page. Essays are due 4/1 in the library by 3:00.  Students that win scholarships must be able to provide transportation to and from Great Oaks Elementary at 9:00 AM and 12 PM on 6/13-6/16. 

Camp Bluebonnet Scholarships!

Mrs. Fournier & Mrs. Kupersztoch (librarian at England Elementary in RRISD) are excited to teach our 5th year of Camp Bluebonnet this summer.  Check out this flyer for more information.  The library is offering a special opportunity this week to two lucky students! 

The Forest North Library is offering 2 scholarships for students to attend Camp Bluebonnet at Old Town Elementary, 6/22-6/25, co-taught by Mrs. Fournier.  For more information, see flyer.

To enter the contest, please submit a 1 page persuasive essay about why you should be chosen for a Camp Bluebonnet scholarship.  Essays are due to the library by Friday, 5/1, at 3:30.  Campers must be a 3rd-5th grader next school year, and campers will need to provide their own transportation to and from camp on 6/22-6/25 at 9:00 and 12:00. Best of luck, campers!

Camp Bluebonnet 2014 Official Video!

Check out this video I made to share our 2014 Camp Bluebonnet session! Thank you again to all of our FABULOUS campers for participating in our 4th Annual Camp Bluebonnet! I’m looking forward to another incredible camp session in 2015!

Camp Bluebonnet 2014

This week, 30 campers from across RRISD came together for a really fun session of Camp Bluebonnet! This was our 4th year having this great camp over at Great Oaks Elementary, and as always, we had a blast. We read 5 of this year’s Texas Bluebonnet Award nominated books together, and had SO much fun in the process! The kids who attended camp are already qualified to vote for their favorite nominee in January, before school even starts.  Amazing, huh?

I teach this camp with Mrs. Kupersztoch over at Elsa England Elementary.  She is a photo editing genius and made all these great photos from camp for our blogs.  Her blog is amazing! Thanks for doing that, Mrs. K!

Thanks, campers, for being so awesome and loving Camp Bluebonnet!

Camp Bluebonnet 2012 - Thursday

As it always seems to do, camp flew by, and before we knew it, it was our (sad!) last day of Camp Bluebonnet 2012. We chose a very special book to help us get over our sadness. Clever Jack Takes the Cake is a special book for RRISD Librarians, especially, because it was chosen as both an Armadillo Readers Choice nominee last year, and a Texas Bluebonnet Award nominee this year! It takes a very special book to be nominated for the two awards dearest to our hearts.

After reading the book, we did some clever activities. Every day at camp, we do an ice breaker where we get to know each other a little better. One day it's bingo, one day you get paired up with someone by finding your match on an index card, and one day, we play the game where a famous person is taped on your back and you have to figure out who it is. Mrs. K and I love this game, and our campers always have a blast with it too. After our daily ice breaker, we decorated our own cakes, just like Clever Jack's, down to the last detail.

After washing up, we tried our hand at letterboxing, Mrs. Fournier's favorite hobby (besides reading, of course.) Mrs. Fournier tried to make a summary of letterboxing on one page for our campers. Check it out at the bottom of this post. For more detailed information about letterboxing, check out atlasquest.com or letterboxing.org or just ask Mrs. Fournier next time you see her!

Mrs. Fournier (and Mr. Fournier, and Mr. Fournier's mom, the other Mrs. Fournier, who is a true artist) worked hard to hand-carve 5 stamps featuring characters from Clever Jack Takes the Cake. Our first session of students worked in teams of 3 and 4 to find a good hiding place at our camp campus to hide their group's stamp, and then wrote a not-too-easy, not-too-hard clue for finding the box. Then, we projected each of the clues with a document camera, and the kids set out to find the stamps and fill their log books. Our July session of campers received the clues from the June session, and only had to find them.

Well, that's all for now, Campers. Mrs. Fournier & Mrs. Kupersztoch were so pleased to have two sold out sessions of camp again this summer, and had a blast with the wonderful students who joined us. Mrs. Fournier also has plans to cut another movie featuring our camp adventures, too, so stay tuned for that!

Camp Bluebonnet 2012 - Wednesday

On our third day of camp, we read the beautiful nonfiction picture book Just Being Audrey. It's a biography. That means (as I'm sure you already know, you smart reader, you) it's a book about a person's life.

After reading, we then watched some of the primary source material (including a few really cool videos) provided on the Texas Bluebonnet Award resources website about Audrey Hepburn's life, good deeds, movies, & fashion. In the book, we learned how after WWII, when Audrey was just starting out as an actress in Paris, she had few clothes, but didn't let that stop her from being fashionable. She had one scarf that she wore 12 different ways- as a head wrap, a bow tie, belt, etc. Mrs. Kuperzstoch and I tried to be tricky. We brought random items from around the house that we thought would be difficult to find uses for. But our genius campers blew us away with their creative ideas for our paper fans, measuring cups, wooden ring holders and koozies.

Speaking of creativity- Just Being Audrey didn't lend itself easily to a snack. Audrey does mention a delicious candy bar she was given by a sweet volunteer when they were liberated from their hideout in Belgium after the war, but that didn't seem unique enough for our campers. So, we looked elsewhere. Each year at Camp Bluebonnet, in addition to our daily picture book, we also work towards reading an entire chapter book. Every day we read 1/4 of the book. This year, our chapter book was Like Pickle Juice on a Cookie. That title, as I'm sure you can imagine, lends itself to a very creative snack.

Camp Bluebonnet 2012 - Tuesday

On our second day of Camp Bluebonnet 2012, we read and worked with Hot Diggity Dog - the History of the Hot Dog. We read the book (with all the sidebars) and worked up an appetite. We studied Coney Island, America's unofficial hot dog capital, through a Prezi I created with primary source material from the kind folks over at http://westland.net/coneyisland.

After that, we were starving! Mrs. Kuperstztoch and I provided a hot dog bar, with all beef or veggie dogs, and all the condiments you could imagine. They were delicious.

Our second activity of the day was creative - our campers created a menu to their own hot dog stand. They were encouraged to give it a punny name, include prices, and could include any specialties they wanted!

Camp Bluebonnet 2012 - Monday

This is the second year I've taught Camp Bluebonnet through Round Rock ISD Community's Education Program. Mrs. Kupersztoch, Librarian of the new Elsa England Elementary (formerly of Brushy Creek Elementary) and I really enjoy spending time doing fun reading activities with our readers each summer! Here's a picture of us after camp one day with our buddy, Joel.

Camp Bluebonnet also helps to start getting us familiar with the twenty nominated Texas Bluebonnet Award nominees for the upcoming year. This is a special year at Camp for Mrs. K & I because we are both honored and delighted to be serving on the Texas Bluebonnet Award Committee! Mrs. K is their webmaster, on the program committee (thanks for the great website, Mrs. K!) and I am on the selection committee, which m

eans next year, the books will have been chosen in part by me!

This summer, we chose 5 of our most favorite of this year's Bluebonnet nominees to feature as we read, played, & ate our way through camp! Each da
y we read one book, (except our chapter book, which we read a quarter of each day), then did two book-related activities, and had a book-related snack!
Postcards from Camp is a great epistolary novel. (I learned the word "epistolary" in college when I studied English. It means a book where it's letters written back and forth.) Postcards From Camp is about David, who is nervous about going to summer camp for the first time, and the postcards and letters he exchanges with his dad throughout camp. It's so funny! Mrs. Kuperzstoch and I had lots of great ideas that went with it- we played camp charades, braided lanyard key chains, made and ate delicious s'more treats, and wrote our own awesome postcards with scrapbooking materials to take home.

Camp Bluebonnet 2011- Thursday

Thursdays were our last day at Camp Bluebonnet. How sad! It flew by. On our last day, we read Balarama: a royal elephant, and did lots of fun activities and snacks relating to India and elephants! Check out what we did in this video, especially our awesome Bollywood dancing!

Camp Bluebonnet 2011 - Wednesday

Today we read Phil Bildner's Hallelujah Flight. Phil Bildner is going to vist our school this year! How exciting that we'll have a real Bluebonnet author visiting us! Check out all of the activities and food we had on Wednesday relating to our book:

Camp Bluebonnet 2011 - Tuesday

On Tuesday we read The Duchess of Whimsy! It was awesome. See all the activities and food we ate relating to the book in this video:

Camp Bluebonnet 2011 - Monday

Hello Forest North! We had 2 awesome sessions of Camp Bluebonnet this summer through the RRISD Community Education Center. It was great to see some of my favorite Eagles even during our vacation! Here's a video of what we did on the first day of camp. If you like it, keep your eyes peeled for flyers going home this spring regarding next summer's camp!

Camp Bluebonnet!

There are still a few spots left in our June session. Come sign up for Camp Bluebonnet with Mrs. Fournier (and Mrs. Kuperzstoch, the Brushy Creek Elementary Librarian) and be ready for the voting party before school even starts! Go to the website listed to register your incoming 3rd, 4th or 5th grade student. All RRISD 3rd-5th grade students are welcome! We'll be posting entries each day after we do our awesome activities at Camp!