Successive Fractions Search

Topic: The Role of Children's Books in Elementary Curriculum
Database: Project Muse
(books or literature or fiction or nonfiction)
(curriculum or instruction or literacy)
(elementary school or grammar school or school library media center)
S1: (books or literature or fiction or nonfiction) 97937 hits
S2: (books or literature or fiction or nonfiction) AND (curriculum or instruction or literacy) 14794 hits
S3: (books or literature or fiction or nonfiction) AND (curriculum or instruction or literacy) AND (elementary school or grammar school or school library media center) 1158 hits

This search technique was helpful in narrowing down results from an insanely large number to a much smaller amount. However, it did not lower it enough to make it a workable number of documents. There is no way that I have time or energy to sift through 1158 documents to find my answer. Therefore, I belive that my search strings may need to be altered in some way in order to really pinpoint relevant documents. Perhaps a snowball approach would help me at this point, since I do not know what other search strings I could use (snowballing from another article could give me some direction). I also could try using fewer synonyms to reduce the number of hits. Overall, successive fractions got me from point A to point B, but I most definitly am not done if my goal is finding the answer efficiently.