Guest Post - Ms. Johnston's Dewey Decimators!

I'm Ms. Johnston and I have been interning with Club Boulevard to learn how to be a media specialist like Mrs. Husketh this fall! Earlier this quarter, I worked on an extended project with Ms. Wall’s fourth graders to help organize their classroom library. In order to organize the books in their classroom, we first had to learn how books are organized in our media center!

We learned that the library is organized by using the Dewey Decimal System, which groups books into categories based on subjects. Teams of two students were given a section of the media center to explore more in-depth to learn what was in that part of the Dewey Decimal System.

Groups of 4-5 pairs came to the media center for a 45 minute period to gather their research on their section. They counted and recorded the number of books in each category – it was a lot of hard work! 

After we finished counting the books in our section it was time to create word clouds! Word clouds are a graphical representation of the frequency of words. The more often a word (or in our case a category) appears, the larger it will be in our word cloud. For this activity we used ABCya! I really like this website - it has a variety of online games that incorporate learning (without seeming like learning).

Our word clouds were filled with the categories of books in each section -- the more books in a category, the larger the word! Students can use the word clouds to easily see what types of books are in each section of the library, and estimate how many will be there!

Students were able to manipulate their word clouds until they were happy with the way they looked. We printed their word clouds and they took them back to class to continue with their projects. I'm excited to see how they turn out! 

Check out a few of our word clouds below and create your own at ABCya!