Dewey Decimal Flower

My sample Dewey Decimal Flower without any pictures....

Sorry this post is delayed....we've had a very busy week/weekend.  Last week we made Dewey Decimal Flowers for Reading.  We are currently learning about the Library, the difference between fiction and non-fiction books, and how books are categorized in the Library.  

One of the kids' favorite activities so far has been the Dewey Decimal Flower.  It is a visual representation of the Dewey Decimal System that the kids can easily understand and it helps them remember the numbers associated with each topic/subject matter.  

The kids started their flowers by cutting out 10 different color petals, one for each of the number sequences in the Dewey Decimal System, 000 - 900.  One difficult thing about our Library section is that there isn't really a "card catalog"  anymore....everything is done on the computer!  I wanted the kids to understand that each book used to have THREE cards (author, title, subject), but now we can search by all of those things and MORE.  We spent a lot of time discussing the different ways to search for books, the best method of searching for a particular book (title), and the best way to do research searches (subject).

 After we had our petals cut out, we had to cut out our stems, leaves, and the middle of our flower, which served as a number guide for our flowers.  We traced circles on construction paper and cut out our yellow flower centers, then divided it into ten parts, writing the numbers 000-900 in each portion.  Then we glued our petals together and added the center circle.  This part was tough because we were trying to match up the numbers on our center to the numbers for each petal.

 Once the flowers were glued together, the kids wrote the categories on the corresponding petal: 000 General Knowledge, 100 Philosophy, 200 Religion, 300 Social Sciences, 400 Languages, 500 Science and Math, 600 Using Science/Technology, 700 Arts & Recreation, 800 Literature, 900 Geography and History.  Once all the petals were labeled, the kids illustrated the petals so they had a visual image of what each category included.  I considered printing out clip art images for the kids to paste on their petals, but decided to let them look through the listings under each category and pick their own image to draw to help cement it in by using something meaningful to them.  My flower (I haven't added images yet) will probably include clip art.

And voila! The kids' Dewey Decimal Flowers!

Asher and Savannah's Dewey Decimal Flowers!

Savannah's Flower Petals.  She took a lot of time drawing each picture.
She wanted the petals perfect, so she took the flower apart three times
trying to get it to fan out correctly.  What a hard worker!

Asher's Flower Petals.  He spent a lot of time writing out things in
each given category and then drawing a small picture.  He managed to get
his flower to fan pretty well until Rosalynne tried 'helping' him and
managed to pull a section apart. What a patient Big Brother!