Researching More
April 16, 2010
Since we did so much work getting the students engaged by teaching them to empathize with characters who lived through the civil rights movement, it was easy to get them excited about their research projects. The students had so many questions that went unanswered that they couldn’t wait to crack open their non-fiction books.
The unit was designed to enhance the students non-fiction reading abilities but to also allow them to research a topic they really cared about. The students put themselves into research groups on topics they were really interested in. There were 6 groups:
- Segregation
- Injustices
- Opposition to the Civil Rights Movement
- Heroes of the Civil Rights Movement
- The Civil Rights Act of 1964
- Jim Crow Laws
The students were required to practice a different research skill each day, and organize the information that they researched in an organized way. Some of the teaching points included:
- Researchers look for specific information by using the index.
- Researchers analyze a non-fiction text by combining the information in the text, pictures, and captions.
- Researchers encounter new vocabulary as they read, one way to figure out the meaning of these unknown words is to use the information in the text as clues.
- Researchers paraphrase new information by putting it in their own words.
These are a few teaching points we used to help the students find and understand new information. The next steps were to take that information and decide what to do with it.
