Hammering In Dewey Decimal

That's how I feel when I begin teaching my students Dewey Decimal.  At first, they resist and only want to hear the Dewey Decimal rap.  This year for library centers, I wised up and put WAY TOO much time into making a Promethean Board flipchart with containers and sounds that ended up being a Dewey Decimal matching game and voila, it's fun!  I provide students with a portable Dewey Decimal guide (laminated pages held together by a ring) and they go to town.  Since they have only 8 minutes, I don't even care if they make all the matches, I just wanted them to understand how to use the guide and then to start to see how the numbers connect to subjects.  

There is another library center where students look through Dewey Decimal scavenger hunt cards** that say clues like, "You have to list 50 words in German and what they mean," they need to figure out which section (using the guides pictured above), and where the section is located.  Most only find one or two books, but they were able to make the connection between subject, section number, and number on spine label of books.


**I would give credit to the person who created these, but have lost the name.

The Joke (Books) in Nonfiction

They are also underrated in that realm.  They are part of the 800's and can be a great way to get younger students into the Dewey Decimal.  In fact, the one series I find to be popular with 1st-5th grade is Michael Dahl's Read-It! Joke Books.  I have my 5th graders reading me jokes out of that book every couple of checkout days.  It never seems to matter to my kids how easy a book looks if it is funny.  You can get a preview of the books here.

Joke books are also a good way to teach partner work, fluency, and giving students think time.  When I was teaching the 3rd grade about the 818 section, I modeled reading aloud jokes and asking for students to guess what the answer could be.  This provided them with a safe environment to not have the correct answer because almost the whole class wanted to guess.  I then asked them to read jokes aloud to each other and they would wait for their classmates to come up with an answer if no answer was guessed right away. 

Image from capstonepub.com