Ahoy, mateys! There be treasure in the library, in the form of stories in honor of "Talk Like a Pirate Day!" Our student teacher Ms. Rivera delivered a swashbuckling storytime featuring Kim Kennedy's Pirate Pete's Talk Like a Pirate, Do Pirates Take Baths? by Kathy Tucker and Henry and the Buccaneer Bunnies by Carolyn Crimi. Our primary pirates met with a parrot (the pirate's best friend) and made their own stick-puppet heads to practice their new vernacular.
The interest in pirates was such that we continued with the classic and Tony award-winning Mary Martin version of Peter Pan, and while we loved the music and the exciting story, it also afforded us a chance to look at the unfair and inaccurate way Native Americans are often depicted and how fiction vs. nonfiction even affects how people are thought about in adventures we love. We looked at We Are the Many: A Picture Book of American Indians by Doreen Rappaport and explored the lives of real Native Americans like Maria Tallchief, Jim Thorpe, Wilma Mankiller and the Navajo Code Talkers and compared it to Tiger Lily in the Peter Pan story. We also talked about how in real life, pirates were probably not really singing and dancing or funny to most people, and how we stay away from open windows. Once we knew what was real and what was pretend, we were free to enjoy our imaginations, singing along with Peter "I Won't Grow Up" and flying around the library with the help of a little of Tinkerbell's leftover fairy dust.
But we didn't put our pirate shovels away after primary! The fifth grade has been digging into the CPS SOAR system, looking for "buried treasure" deep in the databases that can be helpful for homework, learning new things or just for fun! These classes learned how to make a "beeline" to communicate the steps in an internet search, and followed this beeline to discover all sorts of helpful resources and then modeled their own searches to share them with classmates:
> Stone bookworms.blogspot.com
> Online library resources
> SOAR
> Reference
And from there, in both large group and small groups we explored
> Internet Public Library, and
> InfoPlease, and
>Refdesk!
Some students went on to dig even deeper into SOAR's library databases. We all learned about the differences between a website, database and search engine, how to access the library catalog and e-books and how to find the right resource for the task at hand. A bonus beeline leading us to valuable websites in the databases may be submitted for extra credit by October 10th. Keep digging, kiddos, there's lots of gold to be found deep in the databases!
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