Library Centers »

JUDITH SYKES, former teacher-librarian, is principal of an elementary school in Calgary, Canada.

Give students exciting learning opportunities across the curriculum while teaching them important information skills! This book documents a continuous library center program with a series of mini-lessons that cover topics from bears, books, and dinosaurs to natural resources, rockets, and Victorian holiday traditions. Projects use different types of media (e.g., books, tapes, CD-ROMs, the Internet), giving students a variety of experiences with fiction and nonfiction and allowing them to interact with resources-to find books; use the library catalog, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and CD-ROMs; alphabetize; perform author research, build a bibliography, create a book cover and poster; role play; conduct a video interview; and so on. For each center, the author provides reproducible instruction cards, a list of materials, and suggestions for implementation. Various assessment tools are recommended-observation checklists, coaching and discussion, presentations, celebrations, and formal checklists to be