...that the Chinese invented paper and dominoes and silk and fireworks and even kites? They did...along with many other items we still use today!
We have been hard at work researching inventions from China over the past couple weeks.
Our research began with creating a sketch of our invention.
We then wrote down what we already knew about our topic.
Next we wrote down any questions we had about our inventions.
In order for us to find information about our inventions and to answer our questions, we thought about all the places we could go to find information.
Next, as any good researcher knows, we had to write down the sources we used to get information from.
We then wrote down all of the information we found on our topic using lists.
While doing our research we might have run across words we did not know. We wrote these words down on our "Word Page" and defined them using a dictionary.
We used a web to show the important information we gathered and organized it. This made it easier to understand.
If we had any questions that were not answered or new questions about our topic that we did not find answers to, we wrote them on the next page.
Before our final draft was written we completed a self-evaluation about how we felt we did on this project or if we thought we could do anything better.
Our last step was to complete our final draft.
Our research projects turned out great! We learned so much about Chinese inventions!
This is a brilliant process for teaching research. It is quite similar to the one I teach to college graduates that write for our company. The "question" step is particularly crucial; it provides direction for finding, evaluating and synthesizing resources.
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