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!