Light at the end of the tunnel

Change in plans this week due to some 5th graders being gone. Moved map reading and WWII front-loading back a week or two and worked on encyclopedias instead... plus some CYRM reading for a few classes. Interesting work with the groups. Older groups got a worksheet to do on which volume to use to look up words, then got an actual volume to look up one of the words in a team. Although most were successful, there was quite a bit of administrative to-do with kids arguing over who got to get the book, who should handle the paper, etc. Need to solve this by assigning numbers and roles per table, I think. Results in a lot of wasted time.

For younger kids, I walked them through, having various kids come up to either hold a volume or look something up. This seemed pretty effective as the kids were quite attentive to the others who got to be involved.

The goal of both sessions was active participation. Seems like for most of the kids, guided active participation was more effective than being given instructions and then left to work on their own. The exception, not surprisingly, were the high classes who found this method quite satisfactory and were very happy to report out on the facts they found in their encyclopedia topic.

I'd like to move the 5th graders on to understanding how an encyclopedia can help them narrow an inquriy topic by providing headings that divide a subject but this is a tough concept for them. As always, it needs to be broken down and shown very specifically.

On another note, I found a TERRIFIC resource this week that provides research-oriented library ideas that are correlated to Open Court. Although there aren't any specific lessons, it still provides a lot of help for giving kids critical information literacy skills within a learning context.

Cool.

Active participation.

No red ink. (Oh... wait.... that's someone else's mantra!)

posted by Bookworm @ 8:55 PM