This is Zoinks the Answer Alien:
Zoinks Jr.
You may have seen this guy pop up on Twitter a few months ago:
This is Zoinks Jr.! If you don't know the original Zoinks, this is him:
My regular Zoinks/Question of the Week Center is for 3rd-5th graders but the younger kids were getting increasingly interested in him throughout the year. The reason I use Zoinks with 3rd-5th grades is because of the level of questions he asks. The older students need to use a variety of resources to find the answers to the questions. They may have to look up a topic in Destiny, locate the book on the shelves, and use the tools they have to find the answer in the text. The might also need to use some of our more advanced online resources that the younger kids are not familiar with and which aren't appropriate reading levels.
As the younger students became more and more interested in Zoinks, I decided to create a junior version for them. By the midway point in the year, my second grade students were very comfortable with accessing and using PebbleGo and first graders were learning to access and navigate PebbleGo. Now that they had the tools, I thought they could start using Zoinks Jr.
Zoinks Jr. is a little smaller than Zoinks and I think he's pretty cute. The answers to the questions he asks are all in PebbleGo and are a range of thick and thin. Some questions are very obvious but some need a bit of digging to answer. I use the same rules as Zoinks.
Since the first graders started using this center in the spring, I'm hoping to get them started much earlier this year as second graders. The kindergarteners also used PebbleGo quite a bit so they should also get started earlier in first grade.
If you'd like to start a Zoinks/Question of the week center, these Twitter friends have some great takes on the center: @hesterbrarian, @SESLib, and @EdieCrook.
**I just posted my Zoinks Junior/Question of the Week Jr. materials on TPT if you're interested**