Dear Parents,
Assalamu Alaikum
Teachers Hoda, Hina and I will be working together with the grade two students to help them along during their mammal research project. We understand that this is a new way for the grade two students to do research. We want them to familiarize themselves with the research steps -- we want them to feel comfortable and confident in doing so.
On Wednesday, during the grade two library visit, we tackled the first of three steps which is the "Planning" stage (beginning). We discussed what needs to be done. For instance, in the planning stage, students need to know what is required of them. They will need to ask themselves the following questions:
1) What am I asked to do? Answer: Prepare a research project on a mammal of my choice.
2) What mammal will I choose?
3) How long does my research project have to be?
4) Do I need a poster?
5) When is my project due?
Once the above-mentioned questions have been answered, the student can move on to the next phase which is finding out about the mammal.
1) What do I want to know about this mammal? To find out about the mammal, the student should be asking questions using "Who", "What", "Where", "When", "Why", and "How."
When the questions have been formulated, the student can decide which sources would be most helpful in his or her research ( nonfiction book, magazine articles, the internet...). To help them practice a little, I used a "Who", "What", "Where", "When", "Why", and "How" dice. As I rolled the dice, students needed to come up with a question
concerning the black bear using the word "who" for example. When all the six questions were written on the white board, we used the book to answer the questions. We first looked at the table of contents and the index to see if the book was helpful. Once we made sure that it was, we proceeded to find the answers.
On the agenda for next week, the students will have chosen their mammal, and they will be ready to work on the planning stage. During their library visit, the teachers and I will be guiding them along, inshaAllah.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me via email or by phone.
Sincerely,
Nancy-Ann Brethour
