Celebrating Black History Month

 February is Black History Month, and one of our library displays reflects several important events and people associated with that. 

Mike Rawls's website thebookwrangler.com has a fantastic resource for February's celebration of Black History Month, and I tailored it to reflect our own library collection here at the Middle School. Each day of the month highlights an event or person, and it also includes a related book for students to learn more or explore an interest. While many of the featured books are biographies and collected biographies, some stand-alone nonfiction titles are also part of the recommendations. See below for just a few of the people and events recognized:

And you can see the full month here:

Take a look if you're in the library, or stop by each day to see that day's specific person or event. Happy reading!

Biographies & Databases Tic-Tac-Toe

With the newly genrified biography section (see earlier blog post), it was time to get students into the shelves. . . but for what purpose? Knowing that research and database work was part of the Literacy Studies class, why not combine the two? Thus, Biography/Database Tic-Tac-Toe was born!

Before students actually began work on their tic-tac-toe page, we spent class time talking about how biographies are shelved and how we've modified that with our biography categories. One class period was arranged around a sorting activity where students identified into what category a book should be placed and why.

Intentionally, I chose books about people who could easily fit into more than one of our new biography categories. Does Anne Frank belong in World War II/Holocaust? Authors? Perseverance? Famous Women? What about Sally Ride? Astronaut or American History? The most surprising revelation to come out of the activity was related to a biography of Louis Braille. Only 3 of the 18 student groups placed him in the Perseverance category where the book was shelved. Instead, groups overwhelmingly put him in the Scientists/Inventors groups. Since the point of genrifying the biographies was to make them more accessible to students, I made the switch. If students believe Braille is more recognized as an inventor, then the biography should be relocated.

Next, it was time to introduce the actual assignment. Students first took a look at what was expected of them:

As a check for understanding, students completed a 3-2-1 think-pair-share activity. After reading through the handout, they wrote 3 things: 

• 3 main ideas about the tic-tac-toe assignment,
• 2 kinds of things they’ll need to find about the person they’ll be using for this project,
• 1 question they have.

Next, it was time to explore the biography bookshelves and the databases themselves. This gave students some time to browse the new arrangement of the biography collection, in addition to some time in databases they may not have used previously. Classes broke into two groups, and students had directions to follow as they worked in both groups. 

Finally, it was time to work. Students recorded their work on a handout in Google Classroom, and over the course of several days visited a variety of databases, becoming familiar with its search results and how to find and use provided citations help.

As students finish their work later this month, we'll have a day where they share their learning with a classmate and reflect on their database work. More learning to come!

A Bit of Biography Genrifying

Recently in a librarian group post online, a middle school librarian described genrifying her biography section in the hopes of increasing the circulation for those particular books. The librarian established several broad categories for her biographies, rearranged books into those categories, and in just a short period of time, she saw increased circulation.

Our own biography section also sees limited circulation, and even with new titles added each year, biographies remain one of the lesser checked-out genres in the library. With the sixth grade biography project approaching later this spring, the holiday break seemed like a good time to try a little biography genrification ourselves.

First, we needed to create those broad categories that our biographies could fall into. These included some "obvious" piles, like Sports/Athletes, Authors, and American History. Other categories included World Leaders/Politicians, World War II/Holocaust, and Native Americans. All told, 12 broad groups covered all of the biographies in the collection, as well as some of the collected biographies.

Once all of the books were sorted into piles, it was time to reconfigure their places on the existing shelves. With a bit of rearranging to condense books from the reference section, the biographies are now expanded on the shelving. Some of the section appears below.

The only piece of the genrification process that remains is signage, so stay tuned! We're also in the planning stages of literacy studies class activities to reintroduce students to the biography collection. More to come!