Pioneer Library Project

This week's assignment was very helpful for my future career as a teacher. Each collection available at Pioneer library provides a wealth of resources. All were valuable, educational, and easy to navigate. As I am an information junkie, this has been my favorite project thus far.

Here are some samples of what is available at Pioneer Library


1. The Library of Congress has many portals available and I will focus on three favorites
- National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
~ As many resources available as a person could want from a library, from children's
books and Talking Books audio library, to complete piano scores in braille.

- Everyday Mysteries- fun Science Facts Form the Library of Congress
~ Every day you can check in and find a 'question of the day', or you can research
the archives to find past Q & A. The question de jour happened to be "what is the
strongets muscle in the body? The answer: There is no one answer since so many
muscles have different muscle function.

- The Bookstore- Offers many items that feature pictures and information found throughout
the library. One catergory I particuarly liked was the calendars. The pictures
come from books within the library, as previously mentioned, and are of the highest quality.

2. SIRS Discoverer is a search engine that filters through to bring the best of educational links. It is far different than engines such as Google, in that it is education based, not retail based. This, however can cause some obstacles, depending on one's needs. For example, I did a search on 'mazes' so that I could print an easy halloween maze for my class. No maze template came up, but there was a lot of information on corn mazes and other agricultural and historal information on mazes. Interesting, but not what I needed
There are many general topics available and can easily be found on the homepage, such as Cultures, Environment, and Drugs and Alcohol. Another fun feature is the Photo Essays, which show a photo of a topic, such as Roman culture, along with an informative essay.

3. Because I am a preschool teacher, I was particularly drawn to Preschool Pioneer.
there is a delightful Word of the Day http://preschool.uen.org/word_day.shtml which is
colorful and exciting. Today's word was 'nail'.

There are many links to educational resources for subjects such as 'Letters, 'Numbers', and
'Me', many of which are provided by PBS. A favorite of mine was "Cows Don't Quack".

There was a reading section which started out with a helpful tip on the home page icon: "Hold
the book upside down and backwards. See if your child can turn it the right way."