So, its summer time and I have spent a lot of my summer working, relaxing playing with my two children, and not updating the blog. But there have been a lot of things going on in the library. I taught summer school during the month of June. South Carolina decided that for its Lunch and Learn program they wanted all students to have access to the library, which meant they had to hire the librarian to run it. :) I had an awesome summer in the library during the month of June.
There are some exciting changes to the look of the library and the lay out but I want to save talking about those until after I have time to go in and take pictures. But I did want to talk about Pathfinders, or Research Guides, or whatever you want to call them. For me, Pathfinders are annotated bibliographies of online resources on a certain topic. They are to help students and teachers find useful information on a given topic quickly. I have made some in the past for other jobs but no teachers have taken me up on the offer to make them here at Sugar Creek, so I have spent some time this summer making some sample ones so teachers can see what I can do and hopefully request others that I can make for them.
I started with 3rd-5th grade social studies because I figured that starting with older students would be more useful, and those students are the ones more often asked to do online research. And I did some research and made two Pathfinders, One for the 5th grade's first social studies unit of the year, Reconstruction (Which you can find here), and a second pathfinder on Native Americans and South Carolina Native Americans for the 4th and 3rd graders (which you can find here). Because I made these based off of the social studies state standards and not a specific teacher request I tried to make them general. But hopefully they were serve their purpose as inspiration. Hopefully I will know within a few weeks or months!
There are some exciting changes to the look of the library and the lay out but I want to save talking about those until after I have time to go in and take pictures. But I did want to talk about Pathfinders, or Research Guides, or whatever you want to call them. For me, Pathfinders are annotated bibliographies of online resources on a certain topic. They are to help students and teachers find useful information on a given topic quickly. I have made some in the past for other jobs but no teachers have taken me up on the offer to make them here at Sugar Creek, so I have spent some time this summer making some sample ones so teachers can see what I can do and hopefully request others that I can make for them.
I started with 3rd-5th grade social studies because I figured that starting with older students would be more useful, and those students are the ones more often asked to do online research. And I did some research and made two Pathfinders, One for the 5th grade's first social studies unit of the year, Reconstruction (Which you can find here), and a second pathfinder on Native Americans and South Carolina Native Americans for the 4th and 3rd graders (which you can find here). Because I made these based off of the social studies state standards and not a specific teacher request I tried to make them general. But hopefully they were serve their purpose as inspiration. Hopefully I will know within a few weeks or months!