Ready Reference

Ready Reference- Tell who what when where why how
October 11-17

This week in class I learned about almanacs as a new ready reference tool. I was very unfamiliar with this resource beyond thinking that it predicted weather for farmers. The definition in class we developed was: a collection of facts,lists and statistics.

After exploring online almanacs like factmonster and infoplease I was much better informed as the possibilities for this resource in the school setting. The topics it covers are so numerous and the online tools like comparison charts were really cool. These would be helpful for research projects and answering questions for spontaneous reference. The special topical ones like sports, famous African Americans, and National Geographic would be so useful in the school setting. Even though some of these are books ( with some online sources), I think students could actually prefer using these as opposed to looking in other search engines like Google. If you teach them how to use the almanacs they would be able to quickly locate information by just grabbing the book from the shelf as well as enjoy browsing them for interesting facts.