Culture Fair - This is our biggest research project with grades 2-5. Each class picks a country and becomes and expert on it. They research it and do projects and activities with it and read stories about it, etc. On a Night in early March we have a Culture Fair where the whole school comes to visit the different countries and eat different foods from each country and in general have a wonderful time. Here in the Media Center we start our background research. This year we had a travel theme. Our research question was: "Why should I travel to your country" The students had to research three reasons why. We used the awesome database Culturegrams (by ProQuest I think) to do the majority of our research because its just an amazing database for country research. This year I tried to focus a lot on note-taking skills so we learned about Trash vs. treasure note taking methods. Now in January the students will take their research they did with me and use it to create a technology product with our awesome technology teacher! :)
Below you can see 2nd graders working on their research.
It was amazing there was so much problem solving, creativity and critical thinking going on in that room. What kind of Cinderella could I make? How could I make it out of these legos? What part should I make? Plus, all of my learners from the lowest to the highest got it and were engaged and participating. Once they had 10 minutes or so to build we went around and shared our creations. They were amazing. Some of my favorites were Race car Cinderella where Cinderella was a car and rather then losing a shoe she lost a tire for the prince to find and Shop Girl Cinderella where her servitude was in a store that the family owned. But there were many many other good ones.