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Health & Fitness

McCall Library Taken Over By 8th Graders--To Do Research

I happened to be working as a parent volunteer in the McCall Library when an 8th grade class came in and transformed it into a bee-hive of activity.

McCall Middle School eighth-grade English classes are deploying laptops, books, magazines  and even phone interviews to get answers to the questions they've had this year.

Teacher Alison Matthews kept track of factual questions posed by students as classes read literature such as Animal Farm, Witness, Warriors Don’t Cry, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. “I wanted students to be researching something that related to their own interests or experiences in reading the books, not a topic the teacher dictated. These are skills you have to learn by getting out and doing research and it means more if the question you’re working on is important to you.”

Working individually or in groups, students then chose something that still puzzled or intrigued them. Students were at the library for several class periods last week doing research. The McCall library schedule is flexible in order to allow the teachers and students to use resources as they are needed.

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“Information Literacy” is a skill-set all students need to be independent learners in the 21st century. It starts with recognizing a need for information: realizing your own knowledge is incomplete or out-of-date. (Or, with simply being curious.) From there, an information-literate person knows how to formulate a useful question or hypothesis, then locate relevant sources of information and evaluate whether the new information is reliable and objective. Finally, an information-literate person can synthesize what he or she has learned and communicate it to others. Helping students become more information literate is a major goal of the McCall library media program, according to Librarian Jane Henchey.

One student was baffled why publishers had at first turned down the manuscript of George Orwell’s  Animal Farm. Nowadays thousands of American students read it each year. Repeated searches of a historical New York Times database for articles or book reviews around the year the novel was published had turned up nothing, until the student sought help and learned to type in the dates precisely in the format “dd/mm/yyyy”. Then, a review by the historian Arthur Schlesinger popped up on a list of articles.

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Another student wanted to know how the Ku Klux Klan got started. Online searches yielded long lists of sources, but all were about the civil rights movement in the 1960s or later; not much about why the Ku Klux Klan was already in existence at that time or its origins. A catalog search of the print materials led the student to a shelf of non-fiction books for a history.

Once they finish their research, the students will present what they have learned to each other. Next year, Ms. Matthews would like to start doing research in shorter bursts and starting it earlier in the year.

“I would love to keep finding ways to kindle the students’ interests and the connections they feel to the books they read. They are becoming more responsible for their own learning and can see the value in that learning as they impart their knowledge to others.”

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