Creating and Using Scavenger Hunts for Information Literacy By Nina Jackson Franklin Classical Middle School and Tincher Prepratory K-8 National Board Certified

Purpose  Building background knowledge to prepare students for new unit of instruction

Beginnings  Hatchet, created with Literacy Coach

Other Units  Freak the Mighty  Buddhism/Hinduism  Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry  The Giver  Anne Frank  Vietnam  Stepping on the Cracks

Process  Teacher tells me they want to create a Scavenger Hunt to prepare their students for a particular unit.  We discuss which topics or areas they want covered at each station.  I find the resources and create the questions.  The Classroom Teacher reviews the questions and helps me revise it to suit their particular needs.

Video

Hints and Tips  Have the materials at the station.  Either mark the page with a post-it or copy the page.  Give them clues. The focus is on enabling them to find the information, not on the process of getting information.  Have the students leave their backpacks and notebooks in one spot.

Hints and Tips  When possible, make the station longer than most students will have time for; it is all right if they don’t finish.  There can be 4, 6, or 8 stations, depending on the needs of the classroom teacher and the materials.  (Re)Create it to meet the needs of your library.

Examples

Wikis  Kathy Alexander, another Teacher Librarian in Long Beach USD, is in a high technology school. She took two of my Scavenger Hunts and recreated them in a Wiki format.

Conversion to Wiki  Hatchet   Roll of Thunder   She looked broadly at the Scavenger Hunt to decide what kind of information the students were being asked to find.  She then found the same kind of information in online sources she could link the students to.

Conversion to Wiki  She also tried to include images on every page to make it visually interesting and captivating.  She then put together the accompanying worksheet, which she posted on the wiki to make it readily available.

Differentiation  To accommodate a teacher with both accelerated and RSP classes, she created two versions of the Scavenger Hunt for Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. of-thunder-d.wikispaces.com/ of-thunder-d.wikispaces.com/  She turned the articles into PDFs, and then used Adobe to put “hints” on them.  One problem she ran into was that the students were sometimes unclear about when they were being asked for their own thoughts on a question vs. finding the information in the text.

Common Core  Students are being asked to engage with text (primarily non-fiction) that is often at grade level and answer questions that are dependent on the text.  Students are being asked to view pictures, video, or other media and weigh in on what it adds to the information being sought.  Students are using multiple sources to gather information.