One of the my favorite lessons of the year so far, and one that I had never previously attempted, has been teaching "The History of Libraries" to my 4th graders. Their current UOI is How We Organize Ourselves and I thought that a natural correlation to this would be the structure and organizational history of libraries...something that I find most students (and adults!) know very little about.
I created a Google Slides presentation about the history of libraries, going back to the first documented writing examples (cuneiform and hieroglyphics), libraries (The Library of Alexandria, monastic libraries, university libraries in Europe, etc), the discover of paper in China, the invention of the printing press and the Gutenberg Bible (some fun YouTube videos watching the Gutenberg Press in action), and discussion (and more YouTube video examples) of the Platen Press (which they were thrilled to find out I used and studied while doing letterpress in college), and finally the creation and spread of public libraries.
I took two class periods to go through all of the information and my worry that students would be fidgety, bored, and disinterested in the presentation was surprisingly for naught! Kids looked up at the screen in rapt attention and were especially amazed to see that books used to be chained to the shelves due to their rarity and importance.
This presentation has since prompted interesting discussions with the 4th graders about why libraries were created in the first place, why it took so long for public libraries to come about, how Melville Dewey created a universal system for organizing the books, and what the goal of a library is.
In their homeroom classes they have been working on goal setting in both the classroom and in their personal lives. Naturally then, a follow-up to our discussion about libraries and the reason why we have them, is to prompt the students to think of a goal (or more than one if they are able!) to strive for and accomplish this year in the library.
With a simple activity posted on Seesaw:
I have been able to have each student create a goal for the remainder of the year. Many of the goals have had to do with the number of books they read, while others are about challenging themselves in reading books that are more difficult or in a genre that they don't normally gravitate to.
A suggestion from one of the students was for me to create a calendar that can be sent home so that they can keep track of how many books they are reading (or pages per day, whatever their goal may be). I am especially appreciative that they are thinking of ways that I can actually help them accomplish their goals.
We'll see how it goes!