The Internet is full of unit plan ideas for teachers, and many of these plans are really great.
However, you must understand that the teacher who formulated the plan you're going to use/modify has access to different libraries/collections than you do. Perhaps the teacher in question lives and works in a large school with a big media center book collection, or he/she lives in a large urban area that is well-served by public libraries.
The point is: the books listed in unit plans will often NOT be available in your local libraries/media centers.
What do you do?
First, you determine if the BC Library owns books about the topic of your unit, then, second, you go beyond BCL to find and interlibrary loan books from libraries across the United States. Alternatively, you can visit Newton Public Library or the Western District Conference Library and use books that they own.
If you opt for ILL, please remember that ILL of books takes time! It may take a couple of weeks for books you've requested to make it to our library.
The Mariann Wiebe Siebert Collection's purpose is to support curriculum by purchasing the best (as determined by awards, best books lists, etc.) children's literature. It is a relatively small collection (for example, currently the library owns about 4,000 easy books; for comparison, The Library and Book Trade Almanac indicates that over 21,000 PreK-Grade 6 books were published in 2009 alone (http://www.ala.org/tools/number-childrens-books-published.)
Using the library catalog.
You can search our catalog to locate words used to describe books. These words can be part of the title, the subject headings or even the notes (notes typically are written descriptions of the content/themes of books. Not all books have notes, but most recent titles do.)
Here's how to do that:
1. Search for words that you'd like to see appear in the title, notes, or subject headings.
Here's a partial list of the books that BCL owns with your search terms in the "children's" book section.
Select one book to examine more closely.
Books are arranged on the shelf, first by type (E, J or YA) and then by an alphnumeric group. Basically, this group of numbers and letters arranges books by the author's last name and the first letter of the title of the book.
The Call Number for I Walk with Vanessa is J E K451i
WorldCat is a good place to go to find/request books that BCL doesn't own that you'd like to use.
WorldCat lists books owned by libraries across the United States.
Here's how to find more children's books about bullying in WorldCat:
Here are books with the subject heading "Bullying--Juvenile Fiction."
Here's the record for one book found in this search.
You can order this book (or just about any other) using interlibrary loan. See the form below:
