Interdisciplinary Research Project: Reading, Writing, Research, and Social Studies
For this project, students spent a week reading all about Michigan's Native Americans. After a class discussion of previous reading, students decided on the subtopics to research. The class decided on: language, hunting, food, transportation, housing, and tools. Students then began reading information, sifting and sorting important information about each subtopic. They wrote notes and added this information to class posters. After about a week, students were placed into groups according to interest. They spent an additional few days researching one particular topic, working as a group to look for specific information to fill out their poster. They used the information gathered to create a group paragraph about their topic. On the last day of the unit, students jigsawed out into groups, with one person of each specialty in each group. They spend a few minutes teaching others by sharing their poster and reading their paragraph.