“My daughter has to do a report on a city. Can you help us? She wants to use the Internet, but are there any books too?” School has begun and the Newton Falls Public Library staff is always happy to assist students in finding the information they need. We won’t do their homework, but we can help them to learn how to locate what’s required.
An interesting city which this child might consider is Washington D.C. The library has two books specifically for elementary students on this subject: Around Washington, DC with kids by Kathryn McKay and Washington, D.C.: a scrapbook by Laura Lee Benson. Encyclopedias such as World Book are great sources of basic information on a topic and the library has copies which may be borrowed. The City of Washington: an illustrated history by the Junior League of Washington will include important events going back to 1790.
A good place for this student to begin searching online is the library’s home page www.newtonfalls.org. Selecting CHILDREN’S will take her to the Internet Public Library and HomeWorkNow. This latter site will let your child chat online with a librarian who assists in finding reliable information. Ohio Web Library [http://www.ohioweblibrary.org/] also provides many resources including popular magazines, scholarly research journals, newspapers, encyclopedias, and more. Your library card is all you need to access this from home. Since, in this case, we are looking for materials for an elementary age child, we select Resources at Ohio Web Library. There is a section called STUDENTS AND HOMEWORK that can be used to search for information on the selected city.
Your child’s teacher may have also elected to have the library create a Pathfinder. If the teacher requests it, we can assemble a list of websites specifically for the students to use for a particular assignment and make it available on our website. All they need to do is go to our website, select TEACHERS’, find the teacher’s name, click and complete the work. It is an easy way for students to find reliable websites for their homework.
Teachers, if you are interested in having a Pathfinder for your students you may request one through the library’s TEACHERS’ link. Teacher Totes may also be requested. To ensure that all the students will have access to the required materials, give us an Assignment Alert so we can pull books and hold them for just your class to use.
If the worst case scenario occurs and we cannot find anything for a student, we will give a completed and signed Sorry . . . We Tried slip. This notifies parents and teachers that we were unable to fill the request and why. Taking the time to do this also helps us to become aware of subject areas where we may need to acquire more materials.
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