While trying to introduce the Dewey System to third grade, I tried a new analogy on a whim and it was a big success. All of it sudden it clicked for them and they got really excited. This was the first day we'd talked about it so we began by noticing that the books were in number order and a brief reminder about decimals.
Then I told them that we were going to pretend PHA was a dewey category. We said PHA was 100. If we wanted to find information on 3rd grade, we would look in 130 (because 3rd grade = 3). If we wanted to find Ms. Curran's class (3B), we would look for 132 (because C is the third letter of the alphabet). If we wanted to find information on Ossy, we would look for 132.15 because she is the fifteenth student in the class. It helped that all the students know "their numbers" (it's actually really a great system, they line up by number, number their papers which makes grading easy, etc.). Anyway, they got really excited and all wanted to figure out what their Dewey number would be or what their brother or sister's would be.
I tried it a second time today and had the same success. We ended by reading The Shelf Elf Helps Out and taking turns pointing out the sections.
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2 comments:
Wow, that sounds like it would really help kids to "get it." I have a Dewey PPT that I "borrowed" from the librarian I subbed for last year. It is the Dewey Caveman idea -- that Dewey created the DDS by asking himself what essential questions a caveman would ask. It works well for explaining the general categories, but I explaining the subclasses is always harder -- they just don't always understand why it would matter, but I think your idea would give them a great personal connection! Thanks, Karin!
Oh, yeah, I found that caveman power point online and have used that one before.
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