Background and Blog Purpose

My name is Beth Wells, and I am currently the librarian at Journey Elementary School in the Harrisburg School District.  I also work part time for Harrisburg Community Library.  I have worked in three different public libraries and three different elementary school libraries with a little over ten years experience in library work settings and about five years combined expereince tutoring, teaching college composition courses, and subbing.  

I'm looking forward to completing the electronic resources challenge so I can share some new ideas on researching and finding information with my 400+ Kindergarten through Fifth grade students at Journey! I love learning great ideas from other librarians, too, that I can put into my own lessons and programs.

1.  I looked at the World Book Kids first, which we have a link to from our elementary library pages in the Harrisburg School District.  I really like how it has the larger font size and isn't too overwhelming for younger searchers.  Our school will be following the Winter Olympics, and each grade will focus on a country: Canada, Norway, China, Germany, Finland, and Sweden.  I used the search topic "Canada" to see what would come up.  For World Book Kids, it had three main sections to choose from: Articles, Pictures, and Maps.  The read aloud is a great feature for students who can't read yet themselves or for English Language Learners.  It is a bit odd and computerized sounding, but something is better than nothing if you don't know what it says to begin with.

It looks like World Book Discover would be a good complement to World Book Kids, if you need other types of sources.  It adds tables, sounds, websites and timelines.

2.  I also checked out World Book Student.  If you have upper elementary students who are looking for more in depth information on their subject or topic and they are good readers, they may want to switch to this database.  Like World Book Kids, it has Articles, Pictures and Maps, but it goes on to add timelines sounds, tables and websites (like World Book Discover adds, too) as well as research guides, videos, a dictionary, historical maps, special reports, and back in time articles.  Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth grade students may want to delve in to the history of the olympic country they are following, and this site would provide them with back in time articles.  Our elementary students study explorers and the American Revolution in their classrooms, and the maps are helpful for these studies.

3.  I think World Book Kids and World Book Student should usually cover what my students need to find out when searching for information on their reading level, but in certain cases, older students might want to consult World Book Advanced which adds e-books, primary sources, U.S. Supreme Court Cases, and U.S. Presidential Papers.  Even if they can't or don't read an entire document from one of these sections, they may be excited to see the real thing--those primary sources.