Adding the Ingredients
By Elizabeth Swartz

For Reproducible click here. PDF 44KB

IRA/NCTE Standards for the English Language Arts: #7 Students conduct research and synthesize data from a variety of sources to communicate their discoveries in ways that suit their purpose and audience.

Remember how wonderful it was to take all of those ingredients on your grandmother's kitchen counter and turn them into cookies?

Well, a research project might not be the same as baking cookies for your students, but there can be cool surprises that may be just as good as raisins or chocolate chips.

Individual insight. The excitement about research projects can come from the creation of something entirely new. Make sure that your students know that these are not just all the regular facts being copied down in sequential order. Each student's report will answer a question and will incorporate previously-known facts. The element that will make each project unique is the individual insight each student will lend to their project.

While teaching your students how to take all their note cards and organize them into a report, keep in mind all of the various learning styles that are present in your classroom. Some of the children see the trees while others see the forest. While some of your students' reports will start with details and then move into a larger picture, others will start with the overview and then bring in a microscope to examine the various details.

Making cookies. Research writing can actually be very creative. Encourage the students to make their reports lively. When reviewing their note cards for their project, what do your students think is the most exciting fact they learned? Suggest that they begin a paragraph with that nugget.

There are many different ways to paint a picture or build a block house. So too, there are many different ways for your students to put their information together. Use the Teaching K-8 reproducible on the next page to help your students answer their research question in a sequential order. They should organize their note cards first and then write. Of course, make sure they know to have a topic sentence, use supporting details and have a conclusion in their report. But how those elements work together can be as different as the way my grandmother made chocolate chip cookies from the way her grandmother made them.

Sometimes we are so used to putting a puzzle together with the pieces someone else provided that we never consider what it might be like to make a puzzle from scratch. Let your students use the cards to make "cookies" to prove their own conclusion.

For Reproducible click here. PDF 44KB

Elizabeth Swartz is the librarian at the Watsontown and Turbotville Elementary schools in Pennsylvania.