Exploring the Uncharted Waters!!!
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Teacher Resources for this WebQuest
Introduction:
This WebQuest on exploration is designed to be interdisciplinary: language arts & social studies, along with the utilization of communication and presentation skills. The students will be planning their own exploration after acquiring the background knowledge necessary to plan a successful voyage. The final product will be a presentation to their entire class about their voyage. The students will be given choices as to how they want to present their findings. The choices are; making posters to chart the findings, a skit that dramatizes the preparation and the voyage, a poem that chronicles the experience, a drawing in the form of a story board that shows the preparations and the voyage, a PowerPoint presentation, a short story book with illustration and others as approved by the teacher. Students will be working in teams of four to accomplish this task.
Learners:
This unit is designed for fourth grade and integrates social studies, science and language arts standards for the state of California. In addition to fourth grade the unit could be used in sixth grade when discussing the explorations of Marco Polo and others.
Materials:
Folder
Handouts
Access to computersTo make things easier for the teacher it cannot be stressed enough that the handouts should be copied off ahead of time and made available, as the students need them. Otherwise your students will have a management issue at the printer if they are all doing the same project at the same time. Groups should have folders to keep all of their information organized. And of course management of how the students are grouped and when they will use the computer to access the information will need to be preplanned.
Classroom Strategies and Time Allocation
Websites:
The Enchanted Learning website produces children's educational web sites and games which are designed to capture the imagination while maximizing creativity, learning, and enjoyment. The mission of the website is to produce the best educational material, emphasizing creativity and the pure enjoyment of learning.
http://www.enchantedlearning.com
This website discusses the health conditions and measures taken on board Captian Cook's ship.
http://www.mariner.org/age/health.html
Social History is a very concise biographical site of different historical figures. Good reference material for adult use.
Cabrillo:
http://www.socalhistory.org/Biographies/cabrillo.htm
Columbus:
http://www.socialstudiesforkids.com/subjects/columbus.htm
Educators Reference Desk is a site housing lesson plans, resource guides, question archives, and help one search the ERIC Database. There are a variety of topics that may be accessed under the Social Studies heading.
Social Studies for Kids is an interactive site that houses alphabetically, many different social studies topics in an easy to research and use format.
Ponce de Leon:http://www.socialstudiesforkids.com/articles/worldhistory/junponcedeleon1.htm
ThinkQuest sites are student made. The best are archived for future use. This site features Ponce de Leon:
http://library.thinkquest.org/J002678F/ponce_de_leon.htm?tqskip1=1
Documents: