"Look Mrs. Miller....We Our Researching Our Iowa Animals In The Library Today!"

On Friday as soon as the kindergarteners walked into the library they quickly made their way to the shelves holding all of our animal books.  

                       

When I asked them what they were doing all of the kids held up the white index cards they had in their hands.  I asked what their cards said and one little boy said, 

"We are finding books for our animal research."  

I asked them who picked their animals out for them and they all said, 

"We did!"  

It was very obvious that they had animals they loved and that they wanted to research to learn more about them.  Mrs. Gadberry and Miss McClintock encouraged them to wonder and make connections as they thought about which Iowa animal they wanted to research.  

In the blog post Our Kindergarteners Are Starting Their Animal Research Projects...The First Steps That We Are Taking This Week, I shared the resources that I would teach them about in the library.  That was one of our Learning Targets for this first day on the research project during library and technology time. 

The first thing most of the students wanted to do was go to the shelves and find books about their animal.  I showed them how to use Destiny and we searched for their animal together.  

Diana was there at the shelves to then help them find the book we found within Destiny.  

Some of the students went straight to the shelves and looked for their animals.  With our new category based organizational system within our nonfiction books, the students can use these categories to find their books so easily.  

As I mentioned in the first post about their research project, I put a few online resources on the Kindergarten Symbaloo. The kindergarteners and I spent time looking at the new tiles on their webmix and going to the websites.  We also talked about encyclopedias and I showed them around "Animal Kingdom" in Britannica Online.

They were excited to see that they could go to these neat places online and find out information about their Iowa animal....and others too.

My friend Keith was super excited to find a book about his Iowa animal.  I love how he took his notecard and matched it up with the title on the front.

When I walked by Keith a few minutes later, I found him here....

on the National Geographic Kids website.  He even used the images and words to find beavers.  Keith loved how he could play a video and listen to what they sounded like.  He even found them on the map.  

Then I reminded him on the eBooks that we have in MackinVIA.  They are very good at going to MackinVIA and finding the eBooks they want to read.  I told the class that there was a new Group called "K Animal eBooks and Databases".  Keith found an eBook about beavers!

He couldn't have been happier. He was so curious as he investigated all of the resources he had gathered about his Iowa animal.  It was so great seeing how happy he was sitting there learning new things.

Nathan is researching a wild turkey.  We couldn't find a video on the sites, so I used YouTube to find him one.  He could have watched videos of them all day....He thought wild turkeys are very very funny.

As I walked around the library, I loved hearing them share with one another.  They were all learning so many new things about Iowa animals.  And also learning new things about the research process.  By working together, they learned different styles of researching.  They learned to talk about and process the information, as well as listen to their friends as they gained new knowledge too.

My little friend Grace has an owl for her Iowa animal research project.  At the end of the class she came up to me with the pages open and said,

"Mrs. Miller, this owls face is just like an apple."  

This was definitely one of the best days we have had in the library this year.  Filled with curious, sweet, smart words.

I can't wait to see what this week holds as we work through more of the research process.