Teaching the Dewey Decimal System

This week, it was all about learning about Dewey Decimal Classification. It's the way most of our elementary school libraries are organized, so it's important to know how it works. That's why we need to teach it to our students and sometimes even give a refresher course to a few teachers.

For our weekly assignment, we were to share an idea of how to teach the DDC. I've been teaching it to the students at my school for two years now, in my capacity as teacher-librarian, so I shared my process in the discussion forum. My approach focused mainly on giving a tour of the "information section", getting the students to find books on certain subjects and then having them look up and find books on subjects of their choice. Pretty straightforward, but with practice they learn how to navigate the library. The students always seem really excited when they have found the book they are looking for!

When they are able to do that, I might talk more about the different classifications. It's at this point that I like to show this cheesy rap video on Melvil Dewey.

My classmates came up with some really good ideas and shared them in the discussion forum. I liked Niki's idea of the "Big Race". She devised a game where students, working in small groups, are given 10 pictures of different items representing the different classes. Then within a certain allotted time, they must place these pictures in the right area of the library. They can browse the books as they go, and are allowed to go back and change the placement of their cards if there is still time remaining at the end. I really like this hands-on activity and I am going to try it out with my classes in the near future. I think that I'll need to make 10 different sets of picture cards so that the students don't just copy the other teams... ;)

Something that I like to point out when talking about DDC is that if a student knows the Dewey Decimal number of his/her favourite subject, then he/she can find a book on that subject in nearly every library in the world. To go along with this idea, I like to ask the students what their favourite Dewey Decimal number is and then I make them personalized name tags similar to this.

I get the students to write in their own name and their favourite Dewey Decimal number. You can make these personalized tags here.

It's been fun reading about all of my classmates ideas on how to teach DDC. I've been saving a lot of them in a file for future use!