State Brochure Project!

In Social Studies, your third grader has been learning all about how physical geography affects communities. They are able to identify, describe, and give examples of physical features, climate, and natural resources for various geographic areas. We are emphasizing the impact that physical location has on these factors. For example the West Coast, South, Mid-West, and East Coast have very different physical features and climate.. and the boys and girls love learning about them!

We spent this past week reading and learning about 3 very different communities: Roseburg, OR, Las Cruces, NM, and Gloucester, MA. Then we filled out a chart in our Journals with information pertaining to the climate, natural resources, and physical features of each place. This was all in preparation for the upcoming Social Studies Project that we began today. The kiddos are so excited!

Today the students picked a community/state and will make a travel brochure for it! They were able to choose between Boise, ID, Houston, TX, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They began the first part of research today- reading about their state! We will conduct all research for the brochure in class on the Netbooks! We are only using the lwsd.org site for researching information (specifically CultureGram) :)

The above picture is an example of what a brochure could look like. A big part of our conversation is around what the purpose of a travel brochure is, and who the audience is!

This project is great because it aggregates so many academic areas- including what it means to plagiarize.  I'm looking forward to seeing what the kids produce, especially because they seem to be particularly motivated (I think because they get to use the Netbooks....) :)