100% Engaged

I’m sure we’ve all struggled with keeping students engaged for a full class period. The library can be one of the best places to learn in our schools, but it is also challenging to manage students in such large spaces, with many different tasks happening all at once, and so many possible distractions. If your library is anything like mine, during class time there are students coming in and out constantly for individual book check-out, there are teachers coming in and out to access the resources in the workroom, there are tech guys coming in and out to work on tech issues, and all of this doesn’t take into account the activity involved in the library lesson itself. It is daunting sometimes to keep all of the students in the class fully engaged in the learning process.

Well, today I experienced something that simply was too good not to share. I am working with students in 4th and 5th grades on a genre project. The purpose of the project is to review various literary genres and to create a little excitement over some book recommendations. I had planned to share the entire project with you once it was all wrapped up and done, but after what I’ve witnessed today (and over the past few days) I just couldn’t wait to tell you about it! And the “it” isn’t the project…it is the student engagement level!

This project involves Buncee. Basically, students are picking four genres to explore and research. They are charting the definition and characteristics of the genres they choose and then they are digging in to our library collection to find great book titles from those genres. The final piece of the project is creating a promotional poster for one of the book titles. This poster will be posted to a shared Buncee Board. (I will share it with all of you once students have completed their work, but below is the sample I created for students to preview.)

The thing is…I knew it would be a struggle to get students to do the “work” part of this project. I mean seriously, what kid wants to research genres? Especially when there is NO GRADE attached to the assignment?! This is a library lesson after all….I do not give grades. I knew that the Buncee creation would be the key to getting them working. However, what happened has just blown my mind.

I assumed that students would love the “fun part” of creating the promotional poster. They would have the freedom to choose their own backgrounds, stickers, and more. But how on earth would they feel about the Buncee chart I was asking them to create? Plugging information and research into a chart that was basically text just didn’t seem like too much fun, but I trusted that using Buncee would hook the kids. Well, to my amazement, it worked! The students have LOVED it. Buncee has kept them totally engaged in the process of documenting their research!

Adding definitions to each genre category

In all honesty, some of my classes are pretty good at staying engaged with little effort during most library lessons. However, I do have two or three classes that really struggle with independent work and with staying on task during the full 45 minute library lesson time. Today, I observed 100% of students in three different library classes stay on-task for the duration of the work session. Yes, I said 100%. And I took photos to PROVE it!

Looking at Resources in Buncee Adding genre categories in Buncee chart

Buncee in Beach Chairs

There was one afternoon class that did struggle with being a little more social (a.k.a. talking) during the class period, but when I started walking around to see if I could get them back on-task, I discovered that they were talking about the project! They were just a little more boisterous than the previous classes, but they were engaged in the learning! I also saw many students step up as leaders and help others who needed to know a “how-to-do” in Buncee. This is really fun to observe.

In hindsight, I wish I had surveyed students on their knowledge of genres before we started so that I could re-survey and see if this type of engagement in the lesson impacted their learning, but I didn’t do that. But I have confidence that they are really learning about the genres they are investigating and I can’t wait to see what they come up with when creating their promotional posters of the books! Stay tuned!

This blog post is a cross-post with The Happy Library, Leigha Burnham’s blog. She writes: “I’m Leigha, The Happy Librarian! Follow along as I take a leap of faith into the elementary library, creating a space where kids are inspired to read, learn, and make!” You can contact her here, and see the original post at her blog.