Monday, May 21, 2012

Library Visit: Connecting the Lion Shrine to Early Childhood Education

On Monday, May 21st our ECE class traveled to the library to start on our first class project.  As a group, we are trying to teach our future students about representations.  In order to do this, we are using the lion shrine as our example.  As we arrived at the library, we discussed as a group how we wanted to research a variety materials and resources in order to have the most reliable information.  While we were in the library we noticed a couple important points:

  • It was hard to find materials other than picture books in the library.
  • Under juvenile books, we searched for "lions" and "mountain lions."
  • We tried to find resources that have been published recently.
  • It was hard to narrow our resources down because we found many children's books about lions.
Our three different resources we used are:
#1: Cats
#2: Lions
#3: The Little Lion Stone

Throughout our research, we documented by writing in our field notebooks and taking pictures of the steps we took in order to find our resources.

As we were discussing our options in order to implement these books into our future classrooms, we came up with two different ideas.  Our first idea is to make children's books with the kids.  This way they will have a visual representation of the comparisons to the lion shrine and our resources.  Our second idea was for younger classrooms, we thought it is still very important to have more advanced books so students can flip through and look at pictures, captions, and headings.  This way the students can strive to read and learn more through the books that are for older children.

When we came back together as a class, we discussed how we learned several points at the library:
  • Call numbers and their meanings
  • There are lots of different resources at the library
  • Using the CAT search
  • Drawing on our own prior knowledge of what worked for us at ECE students
  • It was hard to find resources on mountain lions
  • We need to think about how broad we want our search to be
  • Lions can be portrayed in many different ways- soft, cuddly, or mean
Different Representations of a Lion   
-fierce          -smart
-scary           -cute
-protective   -respected
-loud           -majestic
-dangerous

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1 comment:

  1. krisMay 29, 2012 at 10:03 PM

    This is a nice post that concisely sums up your library experience. I like that you were thinking about how you might implement an activity in the classroom (and making books is always a great choice!) I have a couple of suggestions for your next post. Try to think about the specifics of your group’s learning. Use quotes when appropriate to demonstrate what is happening. I think that you make some important points about the difficulty of finding materials. This gets at the complexities of processes of learning and products of learning. Becoming keen observers of our processes (and those in our group) provide opportunity to become practiced in this skill for our students when we have classrooms of our own.
    Also, I wonder what YOU learned about lions from this work? And I wonder…how are you making connections to the reading?

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