Mobile Library Lesson: Myths, Legends & Game Shows!

This week our teacher trainees booked the library for the day to celebrate their graduation. This meant that for the day I was kicked out of the library.

I had two library lessons scheduled so as a plan of attack I decided to bring the library lessons to them.

I hadn’t done a mobile-library lesson in a while so it was a lot of fun to plan a few activities. My first job was to fill a rolling cart with books that I thought they’d like.

When I entered the classroom I told them that we were going to borrow books the old fashion way, the way their grandpa used to do it – with pen and paper.

I let students approach the cart a few rows at a time and browse the books, if they found one they liked they had to sign their name and the barcode number of the book on a sheet of paper.

This was a great way to bring in books that they might not normally borrow. By bringing the books to them, I could ensure I did not bring in Diary of a Wimpy Kid or something similar. There’s nothing wrong with Wimpy Kid, but for many students it can be the easy way out, something they can choose blindly and stare at instead of trying something new.

This method went over very well, a lot of the books were borrowed by the end of both lessons.

The next activity was something that I stole from current School Librarian of the Year Amy Mckay

A lot of our English teachers are teaching students about Myths & Legends so I adapted Amy’s Book Quest into a Myths & Legends Quest.

 

The goal of Myths & Legends Quest is to help students become familiar with indices, glossaries, table of contents and other parts of a non-fiction book.

I run it as a competition by putting the students into small groups. Each group gets one of the books. I then hand the sheet out and start the clock, each group has as three minutes to answer the question related to the book.

When time is up they rotate the books around, if they haven’t found the answer to their question they still must rotate their book.

The group that has the most correct answers when all of the books have been rotated is the winner.

This was a lot of fun and it was great to see the students engaging with the non-fiction books that often go overlooked. They took the competition very seriously and were debating with each other about the answers they were provided.

I’ve embedded the PDF below so feel free to modify it to fit your lessons.

 

The last activity was my new favourite game, it’s called Jeopardy Rocks and runs just like the famous tv game show. They don’t have Jeopardy here in the UK but it only takes the students five seconds to figure it out.

It’s a lot of fun making the questions  about books the students have read this year. Again, I put them into five groups for this, read each question and had each group “buzz” in after reading it. It’s easy to keep track of who’s in the lead because the game does all of that for you.

                             

At the end of the game teams get to wager their money to see if they can answer the final question. It’s a huge amount of fun and great way to end the lesson.