Research Project! :)

It was a beautiful snowy day! I hope that you got to spend some time outside in the snow today.  When I asked at the end of the day many students said they were excited to get home and play in the snow. Students were hoping to get a chance to go sledding, build a snowman ( or in one case a snow pig!), and we have had one student anxious to shovel the driveway! I got the chance to use a snow blower for the first time.  It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, but I prefer to shovel the snow.  :) (My husband has a broken arm and couldn't use the snow blower with just one arm.) 

The students have started their Westward Expansion research project. They have picked a topic that they think they want to learn  more about and have begun reading about that topic. The first day students read and took notes about their topic. Today, before starting to read again, students came up with questions they have about their topic. Students catergorized their questions as think and search questions or small questions. Small questions are questions where you will find the answer in one spot in the text. An example would be, " How many miles did Lewis and Clark travel?"  Think and search questions are questions that require the student to find information in more than one place in the text and synthesize that information to answer the question. We will be working on the Westward Expansion project, in both reading and writing, for the next few weeks.

Enjoy your weekend! :)

See you on Monday!