In looking through the title list, I found an intriguing entry titled Literature and Its Times: Profiles of 300 Notable Literary Works and the Historical Events that Influenced Them. In clicking on this link, I was able to choose from a lengthy list of classic books, things like Shakespeare and the Iliad and Odyssey. I chose to read about The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. This was a very long entry with many parts. The entry had the basics like what the book was, a brief synopsis, and about the author. It followed up with a longer section on events in history at the time the short story took place. It delved into such esoteric subjects as education at the time, witches, ghosts and goblins, and the Revolutionary War. Then there was a larger section exploring the story in much more detail including the events in history at the time the story was written. The article concluded with a bibliography for more information, and links to other articles from index terms found within this one. I definitely learned something about the story and especially its time period. Quite interesting, could be very useful if doing a report on one of the included stories. The listen feature also worked well.
In using the search box I decided to type in pregnancy because I had a young patron ask me today about any resources we had on pregnancy. The results from that admittedly broad topic included many pages of articles. I got everything from problems in pregnancy like stillbirth, SIDS, fetal alcohol syndrome, miscarriage, drugs, etc., to contraception and Roe vs Wade. I suppose you could narrow it down, but I decided to have a look at what seemed to be more general resources. I looked at lactation in the Gale Encyclopedia of Children's Health. This resource seemed quite information dense, somewhat difficult to read for my patron of today, with no pictures and lots of big words. I probably wouldn't recommend this particular article to her. Next I tried the Gale Encyclopedia of Nursing and Allied Health on the subject of fetal development. This one had pictures, but still seemed somewhat technical with plenty of big words. It did have some links. The last one I tried was the Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine on the subject of amniocentesis. This particular article seemed easier to read and had an interesting picture. Of all the ones I looked at this seemed the most approachable. I should probably explore more topics in that resource to see if they all had the same feel. The listen feature also seemed to work well in this area. It helped with saying the words which some might find daunting.
Lastly I looked around at other blogs. I had a hard time finding ones that had already done Gale. I finally found Annie's Ideas and SD Library Challenge. They both seemed to have similar experiences. I liked SD Library Challenge's idea of listening with your eyes closed. Hadn't thought of that but it would be a great way of really listening.
Great report, still learning! As you discovered, material in GVRL is for high school and older, and of course, some topics--medicine & science, for instance--will have more difficult vocabulary & concepts. In doing a basic search, please note that you can narrow the topic by clicking article links on the left sidebar. Thanks for your comments.
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