On September 30, our office received a wonderful opportunity to provide input on the new Elementary Integrated Curriculum (EIC) as the writing team is preparing to write for grades 3-5.
The guiding question that we were to address was, "What information literacy skills do rising middle school students need to know and be able to do in order to be successful?"
The content specialist for School Library Media Programs, Kyra Kreinbrook, and I created this presentation for the team. We loved having the opportunity to articulate what we know are key concepts for students to learn in elementary school. We used the School Library State Curriculum for PK-8 (which was adopted by our school district as our local curriculum) http://bit.ly/slmppk8 in order to guide our presentation. We also gathered anecdotal data from middle school library media specialists (via email) on what skills they wished incoming sixth graders knew.
We encouraged the EIC writing team to consider the following key ideas:
- Build capacity--The intent of the progression of the information literacy skills from PreK-12 is to move the students from guided instruction to independent information literacy.
- Inquiry--Consider the background knowledge of the students and incorporate how it can be provided when it is limited or guide the students to ask questions and understand how to develop researchable questions.
- Gain Knowledge--Encourage students to navigate in the online patron's catalog, provide experiences to use an index and enrich a student's use of resources by including a variety in the curriculum, i.e., print encyclopedias and nonfiction/reference, online subscription databases and free Internet websites.
- Think Critically--Encourage the inclusion of Noodletools in the sample lessons. This tool has been a county-wide purchase for grades PK-12 for the past several years and provides a consistent model throughout the county for library media specialists to use when teaching citing sources. If elementary students become familiar with the basics of citations and the use of Noodletools, they will be able to use the more robust and collaborative features of Noodletools in the upper grades.
- Interpret Information--Provide the opportunity for students to generate new knowledge, make connections and inferences.
- Share Knowledge--Use technology for expression, build-in collaborative projects to solve problems, allow for multiple formats as options for students to demonstrate what they know.
- Appreciate Literature--Connect literature and multimedia to learning and identify the relationship between fiction and nonfiction literature and real life, i.e., science fiction versus science...
We look forward to many more opportunities to share the information literacy curriculum with other content areas and we hope that we captured the essence of what our 200 different library media programs are all about!
~Andrea
