Youth & Children's Studies Community Service Learning

Finding children's books and resources on a topic

• The Brantford Public Library has a rich collection of children's novels, picture books, graphic novels, youth videos, teen novels, and non-fiction books for children and teens
• To search for a children's or young adult resource on a topic, type in words that represent your topic and click on the link to audience (on the left side of the page) and select "children" or "teen"
• Further refine your results by clicking on the type of content (fiction or non-fiction) and/or format you need

Activities and worksheets

Books

• Search our Omni catalogue for books of classroom activities
• When searching for books, think in terms of subject areas rather than specific topics
• Use search terms such as: teaching AND activities AND "social studies"

Magazine articles for teachers

• Education Source is a good place for magazine articles for teachers.
• Use terms such as "teaching," "activities OR games," "elementary," and a topic such as "environment"
• Refine your results by clicking on "magazines"

Museum websites

• Museums often include links to resources, lesson plans, and activities
• To find these resources, add the word "museum" and a topic such as "global warming" to the words "teaching activities"

Choose keywords for scholarly resources

• Write down the different concepts used in this question (“vygotsky” AND “zone of proximal development” AND “children”)
• Think of similar terms for the keywords you use (“children” OR “childhood”)
• TIP: Find additional clues for terms in the titles and abstracts of articles
• Locating the right combination of keywords takes time. You may need to go back and forth, revising the terms as you examine your search results
• View our video tutorial on using keywords effectively

Finding articles about youth and children's studies

• A good place to start is the library catalogue.
• There are also databases for every subject area; they list articles on topics within these areas
• The following databases are interdisciplinary in nature and useful for articles on your topics:
  • Youth and Children's Studies @ ProQuest
  • Youth and Children's Studies @ EBSCOhost
• Depending on your topic, you may want one of our subject specific databases. See for example:
  • Education Source (Education)
  • ERIC (Education)
  • PsycINFO (Psychology)
  • Sociological Abstracts (Sociology)
• To find scholarly articles, look for the “peer-reviewed” option in the databases.

Too many search results?

• If you get too many search results, use narrower search terms (e.g. “twitter” instead of “online social networks”)
• Try adding more concepts to your search (“twitter” AND “youth”). Adding more terms that are linked by “AND” will decrease your number of search results

Too few search results?

• Think in terms of broader categories (“online social networks” rather than “twitter”)
• Add alternate terms for each concept (“online social networks” OR “social media”). Adding more terms that are linked by “OR” will increase your number of search results
• TIP: Look at the bibliographies of the most pertinent books and articles on your topic. One author can lead you to others in the field

Need help?

• Don’t hesitate to contact me (Pauline Dewan)
• Email me at pdewan@wlu.ca