research thus far

10/17/12

So it's been going ok so far...  One thing I'm learning is that this whole questioning process, plus the research, looks a lot different with 3rd graders.  They've been having a much more difficult time categorizing questions, but that's ok, because we'll be practicing that all year and over time they'll get it.  I just have to remember to keep spiraling.  Today we worked on researching those questions they prioritized from the ones we generated about the Transcontinental Railroad.  It's actually surprisingly difficult for kids to effectively do a google search that gets them good results.  There are a lot of skills we take for granted when we search on the internet.  Students worked on thinking about what was the main idea, what were the key words within their question that they needed enter into the search engine.  Also, students sometimes had to perform separate, smaller searches to answer a larger question.  But students did get good results, nobody wrote down a ton on their research organizer, but what they did write was for the most part relevant and insightful.  I'll obviously break down their work more concretely and specifically after we finish researching tomorrow at the computer lab and they start putting their research together into a final answer.  I think I'm going to roll this answer into the work we're doing in expedition around paragraph writing.  Yay!  (eye roll)

Pg. 56 of Engaging Readers and Writers with Inquiry

Pitfalls of Essential Questions:
-requires only information retrieval
-begs the question
-is leading
-too generic or general
-too narrow

After coming up with your essential question(s), step 2 is identifying final projects.