Supporting Grade 5's Historical Fiction Unit

Grade 5 students are starting a historical fiction unit in their reading workshop. The essential questions for this unit are:

• How can I read in a way that lets me trace themes in these stories and think about the author’s craft?
• How does talking about books encourage and grow ideas?

To help answer the first question, I collected fiction and non-fiction resources from our print and digital collections on a libguide. Normally, I gather resources for students and post them on the Visual Tab of the library catalog, but this time around I thought that it might be a good unit to introduce our fifth graders to the libguides they'll be using in middle school. Also, libguides allow me to include more information about the different resources than the Visual Tab does. 

The grade 5 historical fiction libguide has tabs for different time periods, corresponding to historical periods reflected in the novel sets the grade 5 students will be reading. On each tab, there is a selection of non-fiction books and links to our databases for each period, and a selection of picture books set in that period. The grade 5 students will be using the non-fiction information to gain an understanding of the historical context for their book club novel. Along with the picture book selections, they will be looking for connecting themes. This is deep reading work, and I'm very pleased to be helping them become even more expert readers. 

Update 14 March, 2016: Just ended a class with one of the grade 5 classes and was delighted to hear students expressing how understanding the historical context of a novel will help them comprehend it better. That's why I love collaborating with teachers - it always leads to enhanced learning. 

Million Minutes of Reading Celebration next Thursday!

Thanks for the ES Student Leadership Team and their sponsors for organizing our Million Minutes of Reading Celebration next Thursday, March 17, from 3:15 to 5. It's Pajama Day in the ES, so keep your pjs on and head down to the ES Hall where we'll be showing the movie Minions. (Get it? A million "minions" of reading, hee hee!)

Admittance to the celebration is free. The SLT will be selling pizza for 10LE and juice for 5LE.

ES homeroom teachers will be sending home tickets to the celebration. Students who will be attending should bring them back signed and hand in to teachers by Tuesday. Teachers will then send a total number of attending students to the SLT by Tuesday. This will help the SLT order enough pizza and juice.

MS students should sign up via this online form or on paper at the MHS library.

Hope to see lots of readers there!

Supporting Grade 5 with the catalog's Visual Tab

This year I've added lots of resources to the grade 5 Visual Tab of our library catalog. Many of the links have been suggested by the grade 5 teachers themselves, and the Visual Tab is getting to be a great resource for fifth graders.

This is a screenshot of the Visual Tab page for their upcoming unit on earth science.

These links give access to videos and text to support their unit. Many of them are requested by the grade 5 teachers. To be posted here, these sites comply with our PAARC guidelines for websites. PAARC stands for Purpose, Authority, Accuracy, Relevance and Currency. (These criteria are also sometimes known as CRAAP, but since I worked with elementary students, I prefer PAARC.) PAARC merits a blog post of its own. Stay tuned.

This is a screenshot of the research links page on the Visual Tab. This includes a list of books about research and links to a bibliography template and citation samples. I'll soon be adding the PAARC poster to the page.

Here's a screenshot of the Visual Tab for the recently completed unit on world development and culture. This unit was only a few weeks long, so it was important to the teachers that students were very focused in their research. Having links to recommended sites helps students avoid the "Google-y eyes syndrome" where the sheer number of Google results means that they spend more time scrolling down the results page than on deep reading of the material they find. 

We have Visual Tab pages for most of the ES social studies and science units of study at CAC. Pages for grades 3 and up are more fully stocked as we do a great deal of research support for those grades, but I do try to have some resources for all grades. 

Here's how to reach the Visual Tab. 

1. Visit the library catalog: http://library.cacegypt.org (Go ahead and bookmark this for quick access.)

2. Choose the elementary school collection. 

3. Click on the Visual Tab tab on the main search page. 

4. Navigate using the picture clues. The social studies and science links are on the CAC Units of Study page. 

This is the same regardless of what grade level you are interested in. Please do take a look at the resources on the Visual Tab and let us know if you or your children find them useful.