EbscoHost

For the first portion of this weeks challenge, I have chosen to explore the kids search feature for middle and high school students because I teach middle school.  I have chosen to explore the area of science as that is one of the areas I teach.  My students will soon be doing a research project on volcanoes and I thought this might be a good source for them to use.  I really liked how the search lets the user narrow down the type of sources (books and encyclopedias, bibliographies, and pictures).  I also like that all articles are dated and contain the Lexile level.  Once into the sources, the information is broken down into subheadings which would help students to focus on the specific types of information they are looking for.

I remained in the kids search feature for my search on Constitution Day resources.  I was able to find many good options to have students be exploring Constitution Day.  The first one I really liked was It Made America by Elizabeth Carney.  The information is interesting and relevant to students.  It comes from a Scholastic News Magazine which I know my students enjoy reading.  Many of the sources I found came from Scholastic sources including, Scholastic News, Scope, and Weekly Reader.  I would also recommend the Constitution Day source from Scholastic News 2006 for teachers because it would be a great pre/post test to determine what students know/have learned about the constitution.

I chose to search Nebraska in the PB Publisher search. I was amazed by the large number of interesting articles on Native American literature.  The search provided a link to the full ebook or a link to the table of contents or the most relevant items depending on what you are in search of.  I thought this could be helpful if you were searching for specific information without having to read the entire book. I find it to be helpful that each book contains a published date and breaks the information into subject areas.