Transcript

Here are some examples of the students' Captain's Log, and here it's really important to talk to them about voice and taking on the voice of their captain. They do two, one is the early life and one is at the end of the life as the captain is reflecting on their accomplishments. These are Pseudo-Artifacts, so this is the representation of what item would best represent their explorer. As I said, lots of ships. They have to write a short report, so they're writing the report text form, it's shorter and it's factual. Timeline entries are a great way to get the children to conceptualize time. And it's a pretty complicated idea. The students come up with a picture, they write the name, the lifespan of their explorer, and they're able to focus on one really important aspect. And then, they take their timeline and it goes up on the wall, so they know which explorers have come before and which explorers are coming after. 

The PowerPoint presentation that students do at the end of our unit is sort of the culminating task, and they're able to share their Captain's Logs with the class while they're doing their 10-15 minute presentation. The PowerPoint presentations are a lot of work because we have to go to the computer lab quite regularly, they research online and using their encyclopaedia and the notes from texts, and they create slides. And we have some rules for slides. First of all, you don't want the background to be too distracting. You want to use the rule of five, which is five jot notes per slide and aim for five words per jot note, not too much text, and you want to pick a font that's legible. So here are some examples of our PowerPoint presentations that the students came up with this year. And because they only have a few words on their PowerPoint slides, they're not tempted to read from their PowerPoints, so they were really successful. 

A new aspect of the project that we added this year were the Trading Cards. And the idea behind that is that they're like a baseball card or a hockey card that they can trade with each other, so they'll each have facts about their explorer. So on one side they have a picture of their explorer and on the other side they have basic facts. The final writing assignment that they do is really a reflection on what the learning process has been. I ask the students to come up with the three most important things they've learning from having completed this four/five week project, and the students write that using an essay format. So they're able to introduce, talk about the three things that they learned most from, and then conclude their essay, and that wraps up our unit very nicely.