Who says teaching bibliographies is dull? Not in this media center! I am so excited to share this lesson with you. Recently, I had a teacher ask me to teach her students about bibliographies and I wasn’t excited about it at first. I had to really think about what I would do to “hook” the kids. It finally came to me. I made it into a very competitive game. First, I quickly went through a PowerPoint about why we have bibliographies and how they are organized. I showed the Citation Machine and Easy Bib online websites, because why would you teach kids all the periods, colons, and underlined words when we have 21st century tools available at our fingertips that can do it for us.
What I really wanted the students to see was that a bibliography is the evidence of the report or research that has been done. The students were now investigators. Each team was given a puzzle and one piece to the puzzle (this was to whet their appetite for the task to come). One person from the team came to my table where I had citations ready for them. They took one citation back to the team and discussed what type of reference source they were looking for.
I had created areas around the media center where all of the resources that I had cited were located. The teams then went to the different areas to locate resource to match their citation.
They took the reference source to the table and carefully looked to see if it was the citation they were given, then they came to show it to me. If they were correct, I would give them another piece for their puzzle and a new citation. This would continue for five rounds until their puzzle was complete. The students LOVED this lesson. I also had so much fun watching them work together to solve the “citation mystery”.
They now know that citations are actual reference sources that others can use to find more information about the subject on which they have done research.
Bibliographies boring, not in this library!