6th GRADE RESEARCH

This past week the 6th grade Language Arts classes began research for their demonstration speeches. As this is their first major research project, I presented a different resource each day to help them build their "road to research." We started on Monday with World Book Online because an encyclopedia give a good overview of a topic. On Tuesday we looked at books from the IMC collection using the I.P.A.C. and its "book bag" to get a list of possibilities. Wednesday brought us to the Gale Virtual Reference Library, a huge database of reference books that DGS shares with the feeder junior high schools. On Thursday I introduced EBSCOHost, one of two magazine/newspaper database subscriptions we have at Lakeview. Finally on Friday, I told the 6th graders that they were ready for Internet searching and suggested that reliable websites could be found in World Book Online and in the bibliographies of many books in the IMC collection. If students follow my "Road Map for Research," they will find that they will have more than enough notes and sources for their project.