#9 - Internet

I began working on finding the perfect Internet site weeks ago when I saw it on the list of items to add to our blog. Unfortunately, I only needed to add one! I searched through Google by using my basic search terms of : children's books/literature and parent involvement. With browsing through the many hits, I came across a lot of great sites to recommend for parents to use to help their child select books or share with children. Earlier this month, I attended a workshop by Dr. Peggy Sharp entitled, "What's NEW in Children's Literature and How to Use it in Your Program". Dr. Sharp has developed an extensive list of new books for librarians and teachers to share. She has a website: www.peggysharp.com where you can see her yearly lists of great books but, I mention this website because it helped me find the website I wanted to include in my blog. Dr. Sharp also recommends websites for promoting reading. This is where I made a connection to something she suggested and one that I had come across in my search. The Children's Literature Network at www.childrensliterturenetwork.org , is an excellent source for librarians, teachers, aspiring authors or illustrators and parents to view. It has lists of recommended books for different ages, information on authors, and many ways to get in touch with authors. I like this website because it is for the person seeking information about good literature to share with kids.

#8 - Research Visual/Multimedia

How important is it that students read everyday?
This chart that I found, by searching through Google Images, comes from the newsletter for the school, Sherwood Forest, written November 5/6, 2008. It explains to parents the correlation of the time reading, the number of words read, and the percentile rank achieved according to the time spent reading.
http://schools.fwps.org/shf/newsshf/newsletter/11.5.08.pdf

It clearly proves that the number of minutes spent reading, not only increases the number of words read by the student, but also increases their success on standardized testing.

Another visual that I would like to add was found while browsing through Google Images, also. While just looking for any kind of picture that would show families enjoying reading together, I came across the advertisement for Highsmith/Upstart's Masters of Reading pictures. After contacting Highsmith/Upstart, I was granted permission to post their version of my favorite piece of artwork. This is Georges Seurat's : Sunday Afternoon on the Island of LaGrande Jatte. They have added books into the hands of all the people visiting in this park. I chose this picture, not only because I love it, but because it added my two favorite loves (the other being books/reading). This day in the park shows that family reading is very essential to all.

Copyright information given from company : ©Lab Safety Supply, Inc.
I apologize for the coloring but, even with their permission, I cannot get the picture to come through in perfect color.

#7 - Image

For this part of our course, we are to add an image to our blog that represents our theme. My theme for this blog is to connect parents and students with good books/authors. With summer fast approaching, I am beginning to think about what to do with my two kids and what example I need to set for my students. I want to advertise the importance of taking the time to read this summer. So, I am posting the theme for the Summer Reading Club for this year. The theme is "Libraries:Deep in the Heart of Texas". http://www.tsl.state.tx.us/ld/projects/trc/2009/use.html

I plan to meet many of my students at the public library while I am visiting the library program with my own kids. The summer reading program is such a great way to keep kids reading, with parents, during the summer.

I hope to have my school library open at least one day a week for kids to come in and check out books. I would also like to have a book club for books on the Bluebonnet list for next year to give students a head start in reading all 20 award winning books. So, that is why I am adding a picture of my school library.

#6d -Browsing Search

For my last search, I chose to try the browsing search. I kept with my general topic of looking for books that kids can share with parents. From my previous searches, I chose a search term that would lead me in the right direction to find something that I could use.

Database: Eric

Browsing terms: childrens books

This query provided me with 8,967 hits. The first few were not what I was looking for. I went back and refined my search by clicking on the suggestions to improve your search. I chose to rank them by relevance. This produced a list (same list just different order) that had the first few hits that were leading to where I was looking. After reading through the first 34 hits, I finally found one that was relevant to what I was looking for, without having to add more search terms.

Title: "Suggested Books for Children: An Annotated Bibliography."

NHSA Dialog: A Research-to-Practice Journal for the Early Intervention Field. 11.4 (2008): 238-247. (found 4-19-2009)

I found this hit to be a relevant book for giving parents and teachers a list of suggested books to share with students. It also looks as if it would be divided into specific lists according to the content of the storybook.

I found the browsing search to be very simplistic but time consuming. I kept wanting to add more search terms to speed up the process of finding a book/article relevant to my query. I guess this should have been the first type of search I had done. It could have led my other queries in a different direction (more enhanced vocabulary) after browsing through all the articles before finding this one.

#6c - Specific Facet Search

For this seach, I used the same topic of finding books that elementary students could share with their parents. I conducted my search on Academic Search Complete by doing the following steps:

Question: What books are good for elementary children to share with parents?

Facets:

S1:books or novels

S2:children or elementary

S3:parents or family


I began my search with S1 because I am looking for books. Unfortunately, this is too broad of a topic and came up with too many hits. I improved the wording for this search by making it:

picture books or novels : This gave me 37,407 hits.

Searching only S2 resulted in 94,148 hits. S3 gave me 35,118 hits. Even though this number was less than S1, it was not what I was looking for - which was books for families to share. Doing a building block search of the revised S1 and S2, I narrowed my results to 6,072. By doing even more with the revised S1 and S2 and S3 search, my results came up to 132 hits. Using the filter of the publication dates narrowed down to the field of 1992-2009, I got 81 results. Using the Advanced Search, I could narrow these results even more by clicking on Scholarly Journals (peer reviewed) and it went down to 8 hits. Looking through these few, I found one that looked promising:

Title: Celebrations, 1992: Literature Across the Curriculum

Author: Cullinan, B.E.

Source: Reading Teacher; May92, Vol. 45, Issue 9, p108, 8p. 5 bw

ISSN: 00340561

This book is about a few picture books that are great for sharing with family, about families, and information about a few other books that are topic specific for students.

My thoughts on this type of search: I don't feel as if it led me to my book any easier than the building blocks search. It did show me that I needed to specify what types of books I was looking for (picture books) to add to my query and help narrow my search.

#6 b - Citation Pearl-Growing Search

Another method of search is the citation pearl-growing or snowball approach search. For this search, I used the Library Literature database. I used the same topic as the last search method.

The results are as follows:

Question: What books are good for elementary children to share with parents?

S1: books or novels

S2: elementary or children

S3: parents or family

S4: S1 AND S2 And S3

After conducting the S4 search, I received 601 hits. I looked through a few of the articles per page for the first 6 pages of results. A common word that I kept seeing, that I didn't even think to add to my list of search words, was literature. I revised my search to include literature as a keyword and received 639 results. The following result uses literature in the Subject(s) listing. Title: The New York Times Parent's Guide to the Best Books for Children. 3rd edition, Revised and Updated

Author: Eden Ross Lipson

Publisher: Three Rivers Press (NY)

Publication Year: 2000

Pages: 530

Physical Description; Illustration

Language of Document: English
ISBN: 0-8129-3018-5 (paperback)

Price: $18

Were I to continue using this search method, my next search modification would be to add either library/librarian or teacher to my search. The book chosen would be an excellent resource for parents, teachers and/or librarians to use. Without realizing it, I have used this method many times when searching for a topic without really knowing the name for the type of search I was using. It works by adding to your results (thus the name: snowballing) but it is narrowing your topic to more specific facets of what you are truly looking for.

#6a - Building Block Search

For this part of the class, we have been asked to perform searches in different databases. For this search, I used the building block method to search the Books in Print database.

Question: What books are good for elementary children to share with parents?

I chose the following facets to perform my search.
s1: books or novels
s2: elementary or children
s3: parents or family
s4: (books or novels) AND (elementary or children) AND (parents or family)

s1 came back with 1810 hits
s2 came back with 13 hits
s3 came back with 3044 hits
s4 returned 1 hit




The above screen shot shows you the one result.
Title: The Complete Idiots Guide to Reading with Your Child
Author: Helen Coronato
Publication Date: August 2007
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
Imprint: Alpha Books
Country of Publication: United States
Market: United States
ISBN: 1-59257-661-3
ISBN 13: 978-1-59257-661-6
Item Status: Out of Print (Readily Available)
Binding Format: Perfect
Pages: 318
Price: $14.95 (USD Retail) (Publisher)

This method of searching worked very well for me. This would be a book (even though it is out of print) that I would recommend to parents when selecting books to read with their children. The search worked when combining the facets for narrowing my search.