Card Catalog Races

I'm going to state right now that this was in no way my idea.

Another teacher told me about a game her library teacher used to play when she was a kid and I took the idea. The previous teacher took two cards from the card catalog, handed them to two kids and they raced to find their book first. I thought this was fabulous (ABC order anyone?) because it teaches students to find books within the library and is a natural precursor or extension to a lesson on the online card catalog. 

Well we don't have a physical card catalog anymore so I made these cards for students to use. That have the title and call number. 

I've done this with third through sixth grade kids and they love it. Even my kids who think they are too cool for everything were begging for another turn or to race their friend. It also means my students actually want to learn where different books are in the library and how to navigate it. I get them to learn what I want and they enjoy it. Everyone wins.

Online Catalog Lesson

I love lessons that take almost no planning and this is one of them. When talking to teachers one thing that came up was a request for books that were already available. Teachers and students had no idea we had access to an online catalog of our library. So that's one thing I feel like has to be made known.

I gave my fourth through sixth grade students a quick tour of the online catalog. We talked about finding books, using keywords if you aren't sure what you are looking for, and how to place a hold. After five to ten minutes of talking I gave them the chance to just explore. They got to look for book subjects that interested them. I kept it pretty freeform because I want students to have freedom in the library and I didn't want it to be a chore for students.

While we did the lesson I noticed a few things: 1) for the most part they followed and did what others were doing, 2) they tended to stick with the books they already knew about instead of exploring new options, and 3) exactly which students struggled with finding books in the library. That shows me we will need to come up with some creative ways to look at different styles of books and explore new interests. 

Book Looks

During summer school I really wanted to see what my kiddos know about using the library, finding books, and understanding what there is to enjoy about the library. They have the knowledge, but they need more practice. 

Of course you always have kids that say they don't like reading. I know so many adults who hated reading as kids and then found a book or series they enjoyed and it encouraged them to keep reading. Harry Potter is a great example of that. So how do we get kids to see different books?

First, I pulled out a piece of butcher paper and had each class write down all the things they enjoy watching on tv. I made sure to tell them it could be anything. Even things that aren't school appropriate as long as the title wasn't inappropriate. The paper was full of different things from sports games to movies to YouTube videos. 

After that we talked about how for everything we like to watch there are probably similar books. Before class I purposely pulled books that fit a specific theme (i.e. Magic, space, cars, horror, sports, travel, cooking, etc). I had ten different stacks of books and only two or three students at each stack. I put a timer on and they had 3 minutes to read the backs of books, flip through, and check to see if there was anything that sounded interesting. At the end they flipped over the butcher paper and wrote down two or three books they were interested in. 

I had a lot of students who thought there was nothing interesting that were begging to check out books right then.