Lesson 4 - SIRS Discoverer and SIRS Issues Researcher

I was not familiar with SIRS Discoverer. I had not really ever used it before. This would be a great resource for our "Question of the week" that we have at the library. We can pose a question and then have the student look up the answer on SIRS.

I can think of several times that students had an unusual request for information. We would have been able to find more information for them and/or show them how to find the information that they needed had I taken this challenge earlier!

Opossum Facts, pictures, articles:Wow, lots of great info with nice easy to use formats. It was nice to see the reading levels (color coded) and lexile levels and you could quickly see if it had graphics available.
Did you know that when baby opossums are born they are less than one inch long. Yes, they are only about the size of a grain of rice. A mother opossum is nature's minivan!
Opossums have 50 teeth, that is more than any other North American land mammal.



I also looked at the leading issues link under database features. This had very interesting pro/con information on topic such as smoking, tanning salons, cyberbullying and junk food.

Current events was interesting.

I looked up information on Pakistan on the country facts section.

SIRS Issues Researcher: The Pro/Con leading issues again listed here with issues more pertinent to older students. Lots of current news articles and links. Since this has many points both pro and con it would make a great site for debate students.

I looked over the curriculum pathfinder and looked under Civics. Several states are considering adopting a policy that high school graduates have to answer most of the questions on the Citizenship test in order to graduate from high school.