Countries of the World
Developing Research Skills (Virtual Tour)
Stage of Literacy Development:
Stage 2: Consolidation / FluencyStage 3: Literacy for Growth
Ages:
7-9
Grade Range:
2nd 3rdFood Groups:
Primary: Writing Processes & Strategies, Knowledge Building
Transcript
This is an example of how I integrate literacy with social studies. In this project, I asked the children to pick a country that they were interested in learning more about. After having done that, we talked about how we would learn more about the country, using encyclopedias and books from the library. This was a very structured activity in that the children had a graphic organizer in order to help them gather the relevant information. I asked them to pick out things like the capital city, and they type of money that is used in the country. After that, the children were required to produce complete sentences using the facts that they had gathered. Some of the children did a very good job at putting the words onto the poster, other children needed a little more help so I provided pre-typed sentences for them with blanks so that they could put in the relevant information. We then talked about how you put information on a poster so that you can communicate what youve learned. So, in the poster, they used stencils to produce the title for the poster, they had to put the information on and write as neatly as possible, of course they have to put their name, we also did flags for each of the countries and a map.
Activity Objective
The goal of Countries of the World: Developing Research Skills (Virtual Tour) is to extend students' understanding of a specific topic and to help them to understand the structural features of a poster.
Quick Tips
Additional Comments:
- Integrated instruction is a teaching approach that connects different subjects according to a selected theme or topic. - Integrating literacy with other curriculum areas encourages self-expression, is motivating and engaging and involves thinking critically. - Guide students to select age-appropriate, non-fiction books from the library. - Supervise the use of the Internet to gather information for research topics. - Pre-teach the concept of writing point form notes, and categorizing information using sub-topics. Using a graphic organizer will help students organize their found information. - Provide computer opportunities for students so that they become familiar with using the Internet for conducting research. Direct them to 2 or 3 age-appropriate research sites and model how to find information from these websites. - Creating posters to inform the audience is a fun way for students to share their understanding of a science topic.
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