Topic: Library Research; review Introductions and Conclusions
Materials needed: Power point presentation on library research, handouts on library research, sample search results for news, magazines, and books
As I limit the skills and grammar rules I teach in this class, I’m finding review takes less time yet seems to be more effective—the students are retaining more. Today I put this sentence up on the board:
Immediately the class recognized that we needed to do this:
Then I asked them, “Would you say, ‘There is two electric cells to charge the robot’?”
They altered the correction and rewrote it.
Finally, we worked on removing there are to make the sentence active. In its final version, we had Two electric cells will charge the robot.
For our next activity, I had run several searches on InfoTrac Junior Edition, one of the many Gale Group resources that we can access through Kent District Library. I had done a simple keyword search “robotics” limited only by articles available in full text. While I read over their paragraphs from last week, they worked in pairs or threesomes to decide which sources they would choose and why.
As I read over the assignments, I was pleased with the results I was seeing, but some people obviously had missed some things in class last week. About half the class had put their whole paper together with the introduction and conclusion, inserted the bibliography, and formatted their paper correctly.
Finishing my speed-editing, I asked the students for the three things every introduction must have.
Anonymously reading each introduction, I asked them to evaluate whether they matched the criteria. It was a great exercise. A couple students identified themselves as I read their papers, but most kept silent. While I had covered pretty thoroughly the No-I’m-going- to- tell- you rule, I had forgotten about the “Now you’ll read about” or referring to the audience rule. Several papers gave me a chance to suggest other ways to accomplishing the same thing.
We reviewed their choices for sources. Several groups had noticed similar topics among the articles and had chosen those. Others had looked for things that were current or relevant-robots and Justin Bieber, robots and apps, ipods and robots. When asked why they didn’t choose a source, the answer was sometimes that the magazine didn’t seem like a good one to cover robotics. Women’s Health came up several times for this. Another reason given was that it just didn’t seem interesting.
Next, we quickly went through the process of locating sources using the KDL databases. This was not even near enough time and I am working on a workshop at the library during class next week.
Finally, we discussed planning the next paper. They were supposed to come to class with their topics chosen, but only a few had done this. When I asked for an example, I got more than I asked for: she wants to do her paper on Theology. Whoa—big topic! We worked through some ideas, but I need to contact her and help her plan more carefully. They’ll be using these pages to plan their papers:
Middle school students will use this one to write 10-12 paragraphs.
High school students will use this one to write 12-15 paragraphs.
Assignment:
- Complete the revisions from the first paper.
- Choose your overall topic/question you plan to answer.
- Plan your paragraph topics.
- Choose 3-5 sources.
