Week 21
Lesson Plan:
Read aloud and continue to have the monsters research and focus until the spring break.
What happened:
On Monday, there were eleven research monsters in my room. I began the meeting by reading a green level book to them about whale sharks. I picked it mostly because I saw a cool picture on Instagram with a whale shark and a boat off the coast of Australia. I took a moment and showed them the picture too before they started to research. One student brought in a book about Honduras so I printed off my countries template. A couple of students finished their green level research projects. One of my monsters moved onto the blue level. Two students typed their reports all afternoon and then another student joined them. Three students started organizing their information. A couple of students wrote reports with an introductory paragraph and a concluding paragraph in their own words. There were two reports on creature of legends, one report on dinosaurs, and one report about the rain forest that were organized today. I remembered to have them publish to someone in the classroom. Overall, the research monsters worked hard this afternoon. They constantly amaze me.
Inside the book about Whale Sharks
On Thursday, it was the last day of school before spring break. Five little research monsters arrived in my room. I was exhausted, but I made the schedule and I was going to stick to it for consistency. They all got to work on their report. One finished her poster about Eagles.
Report about Eagles and all the steps behind the research.
Another slowly worked on their yellow level report about lemurs. Another finished organizing their research about the Loch Ness monster and began to type it on the computer. My final two monsters finished typing their reports on the computer with an introductory and concluding paragraph. Since there were only five monsters today, I had a lot of time to teach them about how to edit, read, reread, correct, edit, fix, and reread their reports over and over again. They learned that reading out loud really helps to find their mistakes. One learned that they forget to add the ‘s’ to the end of their words on several occasions. They worked really hard for the last afternoon before spring break.
Green level report about Mexico and all the steps behind the research.
Week 22
Lesson Plan:
Read aloud, encourage the research monsters to bring in their own resources from the school and local libraries. Continue to research
What happened:
On Monday, I read aloud to them a book about Mars. They had many questions about Mars, but they weren’t really interested in researching a planet. We had a conversation about bringing in resources from the school library and using their local library account that they all had through the school district. I gave some of them time to log onto their library accounts and order some books about a topic they would be interested in researching.
There were various levels of researching today by the eight research monsters in my room. A couple of them were organizing their reports on the blue level. Two finished their research about various topics also on the blue level. I had a student finish her report about Lionel Messi with an introductory paragraph, a concluding paragraph, and a bibliography.
Since the fourth graders learned about recording resources in their classroom, I have really emphasized this skill of keeping track of where they are obtaining their information. They still need some assistance with researching on the computer. Some tried to google research and some didn't know they were doing it at the time. I said, “If you can't write it down as a resource with a www.somethingsomethingsomthing.com, then it's not a resource.” They cannot say “google searched a topic for kids."
I received a couple of completed reports today, but the conversations about soccer players, planets, and former world leaders was awesome!
On Thursday, five research monsters walked into my classroom after school. They were very chatty. It is the day before our school's 50th Anniversary Celebration. The students were very excited. However, they were very eager to get to work.
There were various projects being pursued throughout the classroom. First, a student completed a 7-paragraph paper about George Washington. It was typed with a written introductory paragraph and concluding paragraph. He worked so on this report for about 4 weeks.
There was a blue level report being typed and edited about Benjamin Franklin. There was a report about Yorkshire Terriers being organized into paragraphs. There was a blue level report about Earth that had been finished with the gathering of information. Finally, there was a green level report about Velociraptors in which the student was working on the skill of using more words from the question to write a sentence.
As a new strategy, I gave her a highlighter to highlight the words been used in both the written sentence and from the box on the template to really maximize the use of words being pulled from the question to answer with a complete sentence. This was a new trick that I discovered on my own to get students to use new words that they would not normally use by themselves to explore more vocabulary words. It was a busy and fun afternoon of chatting, researching, editing, and talking about the main ideas of possible paragraphs.
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