Virtual School Library ~ Children's Guide to Research

Virtual School Library | Supporting Literacy & Inquiry-Based Learning

"What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it feels about education." ~ Harold Howe,
Professor Emeritus at the Harvard Graduate School of Education
and a former U.S. Commissioner of Education.

Children's Guide to Research

The web site links below will teach you how to research a topic, gather good information and put it all together in a report. You are encouraged to visit your local public library to take advantage of the many resources available to you including the helpful librarians. Many public libraries have excellent subscription databases that are available to their patrons online, all you need is a library card to login. And don’t forget the many wonderful books and other print sources of information also available at your library.

You can find many books in your library that are full of great information. To locate books on your topic, you must use the catalog. To learn all about this important tool, take the Infopeople Library Catalog Tutorial.

To learn about how books are organized in libraries, visit Do We Really Know Dewey? a web site developed by sixth graders.

To test your library skills and to learn about animals, try the Best Friends Animal Society library scavenger hunt at your library.

Wildlife enthusiasts can follow Cyberbee’s very unique and entertaining tutorial to learn how to do research on the web.

Board the Kentucky Virtual Library’s research rocket to learn how to plan your project, search for information, take notes, and create a report.

The Big 6 is an information problem solving approach developed to guide you through the research process. Click on your grade level and follow the steps provided.

Visit the Library of Congress Learning Page to learn about primary and secondary sources of information.

The Library of Congress America's Story page and their American Memory page are excellent resources for researching American history.

Take a lesson on KidsClick! Worlds of Web Searching to improve your online search skills and to find out what is and is not on the web.

Visual and Sound Search Engines:

Try KidsClick! Kid's Image Search Tools or Google Image Search for pictures.

Visit KidsClick! Kid's Sound Search Tools to locate natural sounds, listen to great speeches or to find many other interesting sounds.

Nature lover's should visit Cornell University Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library to watch and listen to animal behavior recordings. Recording for more than 80 years, the library has over 160,000 recordings representing 67% of the world's birds. Videos of more than 3,000 species may be viewed for free online too.

If you have a reference question try the following: call or visit your local public library, visit their web site or ask a Library of Congress librarian.

Check out the QUICK web site to learn how to tell if the information that you find on the Internet is good information.

Library & Information Skills Lesson Plans:

Learn NC has lessons for grades K-12. Click here to search by grade, subject, and curriculum goal/objective.