"Location, location, location" is just as relevant in a library as it is in real estate. One of the hardest concepts to teach young children is how to interpret the call number of a book to find its location. While working with a third-grade teacher on a communities unit, I stumbled upon the idea of using the analogy of neighborhoods and addresses to teach the students where books are located in the media center and how the different sections are arranged.
Using a digital video camera, I filmed different neighborhoods around our school and surrounding city. I also filmed street signs, house numbers, and maps. I then took footage of the different sections of the media center including shelf labels, book labels, and other signs. Finally, I filmed students looking up a book's call number in the OPAC and locating the book on the shelves. I then edited the film and produced the short video linked above.
My video compares the various neighborhoods that make up a city to the different sections of books that make up a library. It further illustrates the analogy by comparing streets and street signs to shelves and shelf labels. The video compares a book’s call number to an address and then illustrates how looking up an address in a phone book and finding that address on a map is similar to looking up the call number of a book and finding its location in the library. After viewing the video, I took the students on a brief tour of our library, pointing out the different neighborhoods and how the shelves are arranged in each. After the tour, students completed the worksheet linked above.
Using the location concept of neighborhoods and real estate in the video truly helped the students make the connection between a book's call number and the physical arrangement of our library media center. The catchy music and the familiar locations of local neighborhoods and our own media center helped maintain their interest throughout the lesson. Students tapped their feet along with the music, and I heard several of them whisper, "Hey! I've been there!" as they watched. The lesson was so successful that I taught it to the fourth and fifth graders as well. Even more importantly, when I moved to the middle school media center, my former students still refer to the neighborhoods and a book's call number as its address! They have helped me teach this concept to other students who attended a different elementary school.
Using the location of our local school neighborhoods in the actual video proved to be a great motivator in teaching the important concept of interpreting call numbers of books and locating them in the media center.
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