Children's Librarian Resources for kids' 6 to 12 years.
This wiki is a resource page to assist a children's librarian in coming up with programming and services for kids age 6 to 12 years.
Booktalks and Book Clubs
Homework Help
The site’s main page has a white background with a cartoon image of Benjamin Franklin flying a kite. The page is sparse and right to the point, with Ben asking the visitor to the site to choose a grade level. There are links for grade levels: K-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12 and another for Parents and Teachers. The main page also states that the last update for this page was in October, 3, 2007 and that this is a service of the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office. Choosing a grade level on Ben’s Guide takes you to a page where Ben is beside a blackboard with topics on U.S. government and politics and it differs in terms of degree of difficulty and topics per grade level. The page for Parents and Teachers provides teaching tools and other U.S. government links that can be accessed for curriculum materials. The curriculum links that Ben’s Guide provided also covers a wide range of subject matter and can be a good resource for a teacher or librarian. It provides the link to NASA, the Smithsonian Institution, the U.S. Institute of Peace, U.S. Census Bureau, and The National Park Service to name a few (U.S. Government Printing Office, 2007).
Ben’s Guide is sufficient if the student is just interested in understanding concepts or features of the subject matter, or for a student who needs a good starting point in researching the topic. However, the student will need to visit or use other sites if he or she wants more materials or a deeper explanation on the subject matter since the explanation provided by Ben’s Guide is quite concise.
KidSpace is part of the Internet Public Library founded in 1995 by Dr. Joseph Janes. The Internet Public Library (IPL) started as a project in a graduate course by a group of 35 students of the School of Information and Library Studies at the University of Michigan to study the interconnection between librarianship and a distributed network environment. Since then it has expanded to serve the public by providing library services to internet users (University of Michigan, 2007).
The page has a simple design with just a white background and presented in a very matter-of-fact way, no cute images or cartoons just headings of subject matter that will transport the user to links that can help in their assignment. Just like KidSpace, it gathers links that can be used by kids in their research and therefore act as a portal to those sites. The Homework Help page for kids of the Mesa Library also hosts databases for online encyclopedias and reference books that the student can consult for their homework. The databases includes resources like a biography resource center, a history resource center, reference materials, magazine and newspaper articles, almanacs, encyclopedias, and U.S. government publications.
Webmath has a white background with active links to math topics. There are four categories: Number Basics, Ratios, Fractions, and Other Stuff. It also has tabs at the top to take it to other sections of Webmath that caters to different audience, for example, trigonometry & calculus for college students. Webmath carries one paid advertisement in its page, Cosmeo, a Discovery Channel brand that offers fee-based homework assistance. The site does not provide any clue as to who is the author of Webmath and even the Contact Us page only provides a generic email.
The underlying philosophy for Webmath is to provide the student with fill in forms where he or she can put the problems and Webmath solves it but shows the student a step-by-step guide on how to arrive at the solution.
Webmath for K8 displays the step-by-step guide in a white background flash card style page and it highlights the operation that the student needs to perform to arrive at the solution. The page for K8 under the heading Other Stuff also features The Metric System and Practice Your Math. The Metric System allows the student to input numbers to convert, let say, kilos to gram. It will display the answer and the formula on how to arrive at the solution. Practice Your Math lets you do math drills that you can tailor according to what particular mathematical operation you want to practice, the number of questions, number of tries and so on (“Webmath,” n.d.).
The page of Kids’ World has a light grey background and the homework help web links are located in the middle of the page framed by a thick multi-color border line. The page is long since they listed all the web links in that one single page on every subject heading covered by this homework help page. But the user does not have to scroll all the way down to see the whole page since clicking on the topic will automatically jump the page to the section where the web links are located for that particular subject. **Kids’ World is similar to KidSpace and the Mesa Library Kids’ Homework Help page, in the sense that it is a portal to other sites on the topics enumerated on Kids’ World’s page.
continued on Programming and Readers Advisory Page
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