Media Center Orientation

I incorporate quite a bit of technology into my media center lessons during the course of the year, and this is one example. For each class’s first visit to the media center, we do an orientation. For kindergarten and first, we just go over how to check out and take care of books. But for second through fourth, we do a few electronic games to review the media center rules. These games are just PowerPoint re-creations of the game shows “Jeopardy” and “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”, and since I have a ceiling-mounted LCD projector, I project the game onto a very large screen (which continues to entertain the kids when I push the button to make it go up and down, even though they’ve seen it many times!). We divide the class into teams (girls versus boys is always popular) and the teams take turns attempting to answer the questions. The Jeopardy game is especially popular because I created five categories for them to choose their questions from, each category covering a particular aspect of the media center. The games really engage the students and I even had one student tell me that it was “much more fun to learn the rules with this game”. I’ve used these same games for several years but because I have a different one for each grade, the students aren’t doing the same one every year. The actual PowerPoint files were created by some anonymous person and obtained for us by one of our academic coaches. I just filled in the blanks. It’s a simple but effective way of using technology to make an otherwise dreary subject just a little bit more interesting.