Saturday, September 10, 2011

Connected Community - Habitat Build

Several of our staff had the wonderful opportunity to practice what we teach and help create more of a connected community by participating in a Habitat for Humanity build. We learned some new skills, had a great day together, and helped out a community member. At the end of the day, we had installed windows, doors, stairs, a shed, and more!














Thursday, September 8, 2011

New books have arrived!

Our first set of new books for the year has arrived thanks to profits from last spring's book fair! We have about 50 titles from Scholastic. They are in the media center and ready for check out! We tried to save them for the kids, but Caleb wanted to check them out first. We convinced him to leave them for the kids in the end though!










Wednesday, September 7, 2011

It's a Cinch to Cite

As we get geared up to start fun research projects again here at Caleb's Creek, I thought it would be helpful to give some reminders about copyright and citing your sources. As part of any research, you should always give credit where credit is due and you should cite your sources of both information and images.

Your best bet is to use images that grant you permission to use them from sites such as Creative Commons or Pics 4 Learning, or use clip art that is part of the program you are using such as Word. While these grant permission to use, you should still cite the source. For example, if you want a picture of a crocodile, go to Pics 4 Learning, search for crocodile, and this is one of the results you get. You should then copy and paste the url under the picture as I did here:
crocodiles16.jpg - Crocodile swimming in a river

For images, the url is usually enough to give credit, but it still must be for educational use and should not be a copyrighted image if at all possible. For research, you need to cite more information than just the website or title of the book. This citation maker site helps you fill in the information you need to create your bibliography. A bibliography is a list of the sources you used to gather your information and includes both print and non-print sources. Remember that information should be gathered in short phrases and put into your own words, not copied from your source.

We will use all of this a lot this year in the media center so be sure to remember to keep track of sources you use on your projects!