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.