Buzzing like Bees

Baby woolly mammoth #lyuba #historic #hongkong

Image courtesy of Marcel_Ekkel via flickr CC licence By-NC-ND

I just had a very active lesson with Year 1, who are learning about the non-fiction resources in the Library. Last term we spent a lot of time looking at non-fiction books, learning all the vocabulary – glossary, index, keywords – and identifying the purpose of each aspect of a non-fiction books. Just as we were beginning that unit there was a special exhibit in a major shopping mall in Hong Kong, showcasing Lyuba the baby mammoth. We kicked off our unit by looking at the website and talking about the kinds of things we can learn about mammoths and dinosaurs through non-fiction books.

Fast forward past Book Week and we arrive at today – the Year 1 teachers have requested more teaching of skills to do with locating books in the Library, so I have been thinking about how best to convey the concepts behind the Dewey Decimal System. Our Year 1 students are generally quite confident readers, but as in any other school we have some who are highly skilled and some who are still beginners. This means that I need to have some hands-on activities to convey the fundamental concept of organising information by subject groupings without relying upon text-based materials.

Image from Peter Carnavas’ website http://petercarnavas.com

 

Today I read the class a lovely story on the theme of books: The Children Who Loved Books by Peter Carnavas. During the discussion that followed I prompted the students to think about what books are good for – inevitably someone piped up to say that you can learn things from books, which gave me the perfect opening to link to learning about dinosaurs last term and what kinds of books were those? cue the term ‘non-fiction’.

Hands-on Activity: the students were asked to seat themselves in a wide circle on the floor, then I walked around dropping books in front of each child. I had selected four books each from various subject areas – vehicles, fairy tales, energy, animals (mammals), poetry, prehistoric animals, and sports (backup pile) – and as I went around I made sure to scatter the books so that close friends did not all end up with the same subject. I then asked everyone to show the circle the front cover, back cover and spine of their books, and then to point out the title, author (if shown) and spine label of their book.

This is where it gets energetic.

Bees – original picture courtesy of Bengt Oberger (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Everyone had to stand up and try to find three other people to make a group with, without talking. I did not tell them to form subject groups, but said yes or no when they came to show me their pairs and groupings. The “without talking” bit didn’t last very long, but it did keep the noise down to an acceptable level as 20 children shuffled around each other looking very like a colony of bees doing the pollen dance! Once everyone was in a group of four I asked the groups to take turns standing up and tell everyone why their books belonged together. It was really nice to see that one of the boys who is a lower-level reader was the quickest to identify the subject of his group’s books (vehicles), and became the spokesperson. The next time I do this I will again make sure that the quietest get something on their favourite topic, and more dominant students get something unknown to them – supporting and challenging each according to individual need.

The next task was to sit and look at the outside of their books and see whether they could find some other clue as to why those books belonged together. Once one group had identified the numbers on the spine label I asked them to tell everyone what they had found, and then we went around and asked each group to look at the spine labels and say which numbers they had, to confirm that every group had its own set of numbers according to the subject of their books. It became very loud at this point, as they read numbers out loud and compared within their groups. This is where it starts to be very challenging for Year 1 – we organise the non-fiction by Dewey Decimal numbers, yet these children aren’t quite ready to cope with 3-digit numbers yet, let alone decimal places.

So how do I modify this concept for these young learners? My goal is for all the students to understand that each general type of book has a number on the spine label, and that if they can locate similar numbers they can look along the shelves until they find the right section – so look at the 500 to find animals for instance. Next week will be another hands-on activity (the more active students, who are not always boys, will enjoy this one!) – we are going to ‘snake’ around the shelves, trailing our fingers across the numbers, to see if we can discover how the numbers go up from 001 to 999 as we go along.