Inquiry Project

We finished our Inquiry Projects this week for class. I chose to do mine on Native Americans, particularly The Cherokee Indians. I decided to focus on fourth grade, so I used a Houghton-Mifflin textbook called Social Studies: Tennessee grade 4 - United States, The Early Years. I mainly focused on chapter 3 in the textbook, entitled "The First Tennesseans." This chapter had sections on the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, and Shawnee Indians. I also found a website through Ehow with some "Cherokee Facts for Kids" that the students could utilize to answer the questions on the inquiry project. We created a Wiki with our questions and answers online and a paper handout that would be given to students in a class. 

For the handout, you must start with a name and date space at the top of the page. It is best to put these in the header section of the page, so you don't waste any of your space within the margins. Next, you want to title the handout. Mine was titled "Native American Research: The Cherokee." For younger students, it is best to add some sort of graphic to grab their attention, so I added a picture of Sequoyah, a famous Cherokee Indian. I then added clear directions for how to complete the worksheet. The directions must be able to stand alone, so no extra teacher direction is needed. After the directions, I gave the students the URL for the Ehow website to use for their research. Then, I listed about 5 simple questions (with space to write after each) that would be answered from the material on the website. Finally, I listed the standards for Tennessee and NETS•S that would be met through the activity. 

For this activity, the standards met were:

NETS•S: 3: (3b, 3d) Research and Information; 6: (6a, 6b) Technology Operations

Tennessee Social Studies, 4^th: 4.1.spi.1 (Pre-colonial Native American groups); 4.5.spi.1 (Cherokee, Creeks, Chickasaw)

This inquiry project is a great way to get students involved in learning, while still utilizing technology. You could even incorporate higher-thinking as well. This could be used at any level in elementary school; however, with younger children the formatting would have to be changed simply because they can't read or research as well yet. 

I also ended up finding a WebQuest that pertained to this Inquiry Project. I posted that in the Resources section of my website. 

Next week, we will be working on Web 2.0 projects with a partner. My partner and my project is on "Wordle."