Student-Curated Book Displays: A Practical Application of Catalog Skills

Project-based learning has a big audience in our district, but it's difficult to complete an entire PBL unit when you only see students for 55 minutes a week (or less, with assemblies and Fun Runs and field trips!). I try to incorporate as much authentic learning into my lessons as possible, and I'm suuper excited about my newest attempt: 4th grader-curated book displays using catalog skills!

I introduce Destiny in second grade, so fourth graders have had a great deal of practice finding books in our online catalog and then on the shelf. Now comes the ultimate test: a two-week project in which they have to think of keywords for a seasonal display, find books that would fit in the display using our online catalog, and then pull the books from the display and scan them into a resource list. I am SO excited about this idea and super hopeful it turns out!!

First, students will be randomly assigned one of 8 seasonal display topics that will be displayed in the next few weeks. Since I am doing this at the beginning of the year as part of library orientation / Destiny review, the displays I picked are:

• Diwali (Oct 27 this year)
• Bullying Prevention Month (October)
• Disability Awareness Month (October)
• Native American Heritage Month (November)
• Italian American Heritage Month (October)
• Thanksgiving
• Veterans' Day
• Election Day

I pull my Halloween books in the beginning of October, so this would be a little late to include Halloween for me!

I collated the copies so all 8 topics cycled through one after another, in order to distribute them evenly. Students first listed 3 key words that they could use to search for books (a throwback to 3rd grade, when we did LOTS of work around key words!), then used an iPad to search Destiny for those key words and listed at least 5 books, along with their call numbers. We regrouped to share what we'd found, and I collected the sheets for next week!

Part 2

The second part of this lesson came the next week, when it was time to pull the titles from the shelf! I found that I had to review all the different sections of our library, because with this kind of search, students were finding some titles in smaller sections, like our Easy Non-Fiction and Early Chapter Book sections, that they aren't as familiar with. I passed their papers back out, this time putting them into groups according to which display they were researching. Each group was responsible for finding all the books on their lists, and then one student from each group scanned the books into a Resource List. The reason I had them scan the books into the resource list is because I had to put all the books back on the shelf for the next class! I wanted to make sure every group got to pull all their books, which ended up being a lot of extra shelving for me. Worth it though, to see their pride over their own display! The resource list is important so I can make sure every group's books are all represented.

Centers This Week

I always like to make sure that the center work supports what we're doing in the lessons as well. The Chromebook center for these two weeks is the library game Shelver, and the writing center is a chance to create a sign to go along with their displays.

Here are some of our finished displays: 


They are pumped to see their own displays up, and I'm excited that they were able to pull their own collections!