Room 11 Dewey Detectives and Draw-ers

The Dewey Decimal system is a way of sorting nonfiction books. I don't expect my students to memorize specific numbers; that's what the online catalog is for. I do, however, want them to understand how certain topics go together. At least according to how Mr. Dewey thought they did.

Each table of fourth graders got a stack of books from a "hundreds." They had to work together to figure out how the subjects could be classified under one major label. Can you solve the puzzles?

• 500s: planets, electricity, magnets, weather, dinosaurs, bugs, ecosystems, animals
• 700s: movies, art, photography, music, sports,jokes, crafts
• 900s: maps, ancient civilizations, countries, states, wars, explorers

After they successfully identified their hundreds' categories, Room 11 had fun drawing: