Month: October 2011

To begin Term 4 the primary grades had a professional development day with Kath Murdoch (of whom more later), which has led staff to rethink some of their plans, thus leaving Library time somewhat unfocussed.

What to do when the plans haven’t fruited yet? Grab a great one-lesson-wonder and run with it! Thus today I ran Speed Dating with two different Year 5 classes. I found a great timer online (don’t worry about the ads on the front page, they are removed when you choose the full-screen view) and filled the IWB screen with the countdown. The first class were instructed to choose a good book to bring to the circle, and we set the timer for 1 minute. Something I noticed was that the children tended to select popular and familiar books, and thus much of the class already knew about many of the books being passed around the circle. Also the 1 minute time limit was a little bit short, I thought, and didn’t allow for anything more than the most superficial taste.

The second Year 5 class immediately afterwards became an experimental contrast group – instead of letting the students choose, I consulted with their class teacher and selected classics, both modern and less so, of a variety of genres and thicknesses – eg Judy Blume, John Marsden, Paul Jennings, Moya Simons, Black Beauty (review), Hatchet (reviews), Danny the Champion of the World. I upped the time to 90 seconds, thinking that the style of some of the older books would take a little longer to draw in the students’ attention. Scanning the range of thumbs up/sideways/down after each book, this second group seemed to have fewer whole-hearted “loves” each round. However, at the end of the lesson almost half the class chose to borrow one of the books they had met during the speed dating. Compared to the first group this was an increase of about 5-6 students, which I feel is a significant difference. Perhaps the popularity and familiarity of the books chosen by the first group actually made the activity less effective? I think that this speed dating technique is likely to be most effective when all the books are complete unknowns.

Next I will try the Blind Date variation of this activity – where the students only have a page of the book to read, and do not know anything else about the book until all is revealed in the last ten minutes. I have done this before with coded post-it notes on the books and photocopies, but perhaps I can come up with something else – maybe brown-paper lunch bags to hide the books, and the photocopies glued to the front and back? I shall have to think quickly – my next Year 5 class is second lesson tomorrow.