(Last year's situation was much, much worse this time of year, and having been stuck inside for weeks due to extreme spare the air days, students last year also had similar questions, so this year's project was actually and revamp of last year's inquiry project with our students.)
We discovered 5 overarching questions that the students had about the wildfires in California:
- How do they start?
- What is fire "made of"?
- Can wildfires be beneficial?
- Where do wildfires happen?
- How do we stop a wildfire?
The goal now-- to have students research the answers themselves using a guided research technique. I also realized that this could be a great opportunity to have students explore local geography so I create a Google MyMap with pins at various fire sites in California.
On each pin I embedded different photos of wildfires, videos about the science of wildfires and links to articles and readings on each pin so that students could "search" for the information that they needed. I color coded the 2018 pins and the 2019 pins so students could easily see the difference in the number of wildfires in California last year vs. this year. I also loaded KMZ files of wildfire maps created by local news organizations that traced out the size of some of the largest wildfires as a way of comparing the fire areas to the size of local communities that our students are more familiar with (we could view the fire area overlay against the size of our local town, for example).
Before launching our hypermap, we gave a mini-lesson to our 2nd graders on research skills. The
topics we covered included:
We modeled using the hypermap to "search" for the information that would help answer their
individual research question and ignore everything else that was not relevant to their topic. We also explained the importance of paying attention to the reliability of resources (and let them know that we pre-screened everything this time so they don't have to rate the reliability themselves). We linked the map into our Google Classrooms so that students could easily access it and they were given 2-3 40 minute sessions to explore and practice researching.
On each pin I embedded different photos of wildfires, videos about the science of wildfires and links to articles and readings on each pin so that students could "search" for the information that they needed. I color coded the 2018 pins and the 2019 pins so students could easily see the difference in the number of wildfires in California last year vs. this year. I also loaded KMZ files of wildfire maps created by local news organizations that traced out the size of some of the largest wildfires as a way of comparing the fire areas to the size of local communities that our students are more familiar with (we could view the fire area overlay against the size of our local town, for example).Before launching our hypermap, we gave a mini-lesson to our 2nd graders on research skills. The
topics we covered included:
- Writing a better search phrase
- Honing in on the content you actually need (and avoiding all the other "noise" on the Internet)
- Using reliable resources
We modeled using the hypermap to "search" for the information that would help answer their individual research question and ignore everything else that was not relevant to their topic. We also explained the importance of paying attention to the reliability of resources (and let them know that we pre-screened everything this time so they don't have to rate the reliability themselves). We linked the map into our Google Classrooms so that students could easily access it and they were given 2-3 40 minute sessions to explore and practice researching.
Our students loved having so much learning choice organized into one place (maps, video, reading and photos) and are practicing important Internet research skills in a scaffolded and safe format.
Our Map:
