January 18, 2012

Over the last few weeks since Winter Break, 7th grade students have been coming to the media center on a regular basis to work on their Social Science Fair projects.  They have been doing research both on the computers and in our print collection.  Unlike past years, the new teacher in this class decided not to bring the students down for information skills classes to kick off their research.  So as the students come to the media center in groups of eight, (sometimes more as both the social studies and language arts teachers are working jointly on the SS Fair), I work with them to help them find print resources as well as online resources using our World Book Online, GALILEO, NetTrekker, Infotopia, and, their favorite, of course, Google.  Our director of instruction also came down most of last week to help them as I do not have a clerk to cover the other LMC duties which would allow me to give them my full attention. They've done pretty well considering their topics are so broad and varied.  They each get to pick their own topic so no two are alike. I was unable to create a pathfinder that would cover so many different topics, but students did refer quite often to the school Students Online page I created that has lots of helpful links.  Overall, this was a great collaborative teaching project between the LA and SS teachers, the director of instruction and me as library media specialist.