Gale Virtual Reference Library

Our 8th graders will soon be studying the American Civil War, so I decided to look at the history area of Gale Virtual Reference Library.  I then clicked on the History section, and chose American Civil War Reference Library.  This reference resource has five volumes available with a copyright date of 2000.  I looked at the eTable of Contents and chose the American Civil War Timeline.  This timeline would certainly be helpful to our students as they work on their research project and try to keep all Civil War events in the right chronological order.  I then browsed through the eIndex and look at several articles.  I can see that this reference source would be very helpful to our 8th graders for their research project because it provides ample information and illustrations on the different battles and key people of the Civil War.

I tried several different searches in "Basic Search" that had to do with Ancient China since our 6th grade students will start studying that topic this week.  I did three different searches and searched for clay army, Great Wall of China, and the Chinese New Year.  I did not find a whole lot of information for these specific topics, but I did find a lot of information on Ancient China.  Unfortunately, I think the reading level on most of the sources will be too hard for my 6th graders.  Although the Read Speaker feature would be very helpful to those students with a lower reading level.  Also, the translation feature into another language would be great for our ESL students.  Gale Virtual Reference Library is another great resource that the State Library has provided for us, and we are so fortunate to have these services available for our students!