Allowing your students to demonstrate their creative thoughts is great, but it’s also important to develop their research skills.
Giving your students tips on how to pick out relevant facts from their research will become such an instrumental tool in their writing as they get older and are asked to compose more and more research-based writing across a variety of school subjects.
Developing Research Skills: 3 Writing Projects for Elementary Students
Help your students begin the process of learning how to find and organize information and then put it together to form anything from a paragraph to a one-page paper.
Writing Project #1: What’s your favorite animal? Find out where it lives, what it eats and what characteristics make it unique.
Most likely you’ve employed rubrics in other projects for your class from book reports to science projects. They are extremely useful tools for students to understand exactly what is expected of them for a particular assignment.
Not only can rubric tell your students what they’ll be graded on, but they can use it to help them understand how much research they need to complete for a given project. For example, for younger students, you might ask them to give three facts, specified to details such as food, habitat and size, that they must put into a paragraph about the animals.
However, if you teach older students such as 3rd graders, you may want to check out this teacher’s rubric (see above) for her state animal research project. It provides information on what will be graded and details that students need to include both facts and descriptions of the animal.
PROJECT IDEA
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This “All About Animals Classbook” is a scalable idea that easily works from kindergarten to 4th and 5th-grade level students. The “All About…” animal project, which is based on the above question and follow-up prompts, ranges from a couple of sentences to a paragraph to a page, depending on your grade level. Have your students take the facts and details gathered based on the rubric to create a piece that provides an information about their favorite animal.
Have your students draw an illustration of their animal—maybe even featuring a defining characteristic or some other highlighted fact that meets the rubric requirements. Publish each students writing and illustration in one awesome animal-tastic classbook!
Writing Project #2: Pick a place you want to visit someday. Research the history of that location and tell me the top three historical facts and why they are significant.
A method for organizing is called “scaffolding,” and it builds upon each point to help your students understand how they are building the paper to describe and tell the facts about their particular topic.
Here’s an example of scaffolding for the higher grade levels (6th-8th), but it could be scaled down for lower elementary grades. Presented in the form of graphic organizers, the scaffolding technique can be used to help build their paragraph, a one-pager or even two-page paper.
Helping your students go from the original topic or questions to conclusion shows them how to put together a paper from start to finish. The same teacher who put together the scaffold organizer above also provides a plan to help teachers walk through the research paper—again while these examples are geared more towards upper elementary or junior high grade levels—if you scale it down, you could easily adapt a lesson plan that works for your class.
PROJECT IDEA
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This research and writing project is focused on your students’ desire to visit a place; why not have them finish off the project by creating an illustration that resembles a photograph from their pretend trip? What if the picture had a frame around it? Or it looked like it was a collage of several photos from a trip? Combine the illustration with the writing exercise and put them into a published classbook . Maybe they’ll use it to motivate themselves as an adult to visit their favorite destination!
Writing Project #3: What’s your favorite flower or plant? Where can this plant be found? What does it need to survive? When is the best time to plant it?
Walking your students through the research process is important part of these writing projects—whether it’s all in class or at home.
For example, showing your students how to take notes gives them not only tactics to remember important facts that they’ll need to source or rewrite and present in their papers, but also demonstrates various ways to actually write down the information.
Here are tips you can provide your students to help them understand how to keep track of research:
- Take down key words and/or phrases
- Use numbers or bullet points in your notes
- Use headings to collect facts and details for each topic/point you want to make in your paper
- Use arrows or doodles to help direct you to the facts you want to highlight
Once your students take their notes, which again might be from one book or multiple sources including online materials, then they need to organize their thoughts.
Borrow and customize this organizer for your class, and provide a great way to show your students how to build their papers.
PROJECT IDEA
After your students research and write about their flower based on the notes they took, bring in several seed packets for flowers to show your students what they look like. Then have your students create a pretend cover for a seed packet for their favorite flower (or plant). Take the seed packet drawing and the paragraph or paper and make a beautiful classbook that gives your students a keepsake for one of their first research papers.
Additional Tools for Teachers
Head over to our online teacher’s lounge where you’ll find suggestions and ideas from your fellow teachers that will inspire you. We want to give your students the tools they need to become great writers.
Also, don’t miss the chance to sign up to receive your free classbook publishing kit while you’re on our website. Use the kit to create an amazing memory for your class!