Big6 research projects

Why yes, it has been quite awhile. I thought I was going to spend a lot of time blogging about my experiences as a school librarian during my first year on the job, but reality hit, and I was spending more time learning my job and less time blogging about it. I have no regrets about that, as I learned way more than I could possibly put into a year of blog posts. However, I am interested in getting back into throwing my $.02 out there about library and education-related topics. One of my passions in graduate school was the Big6 research method. My district was fortunate enough to have the founders of this method speak at a conference of school librarians two years ago. The summary of it is listed here; it's the type of problem-solving method that I wish had been a focus of education when I was in school, as I think I would have enjoyed it. It focuses on allowing the student to decide what he or she wants to learn about a particular topic, letting him or her formulate the questions and then helping him or her choose sources. I am teaching this method to fourth and fifth graders, and this semester they are doing projects on topics relating to their science curricula. I was expecting a few "science is boring, I'm not interested in any of this" type responses--I did teach adolescents for several years. And I did have one student ask if he couldn't just research wrestling. However, the majority of responses have been positive and even exciting. Fourth graders want to learn about volcanoes. They want to learn how magnets work. They want to learn how their favorite wild animal adapts to its habitat. Fifth graders want to learn how hurricanes and tornadoes form. They want to learn about different systems of the human body. They want to study various ecosystems--I had not had this one on the list, but I had a pair of students ask if they could research the ocean and its ecosystem. This is my first real foray into teaching this method; I introduced it to the fourth and fifth graders I taught last year but was not able to do much more than that due to time constraints that I had not anticipated. I'm waiting to see how it pans out this semester and what I need to tweak for next semester when this same group of students do Big6 projects on social studies related projects.