WebQuest to the Constitution

Yesterday, we taught our inquiry lesson to the fifth graders! This lesson was a very interesting lesson because the students would be engaging in a webquest.  A webquest is an inquiry lesson that has the learners solve a problem using resources that come from the web. This is a great way to incorporate technology into any lesson.  It will keep the students engaged an participating throughout. 

Follow this link to check out our WebQuest!

For my group, this was going to be an all new experience since we have never taught a webquest lesson before. However, we were excited to teach a lesson where the students were going to use the iPads since they would be having a lot of fun!

Before the students started their webquest journey, we had to get them onto our webquest site.  We created this site using google sites, and you can view our site by clicking the link to the right. This part of our lesson is what took the longest.  We had the students find the link in their google classroom, but the link would not go to the site.  This forced us to copy and paste the links into an internet browser.  This part of the lesson was out of our hands and it was kind of stressful, but once we got all of the students onto the site everything went pretty smooth.

Go to the Kahoot website by clicking here!

To review what the students have learned, we had them play a Kahoot.  This is a game based learning program that has the students playing against eachtother and answering different questions about what they learned.  Kahoots are great because they can easily be changed and adapted to whatever you are teaching.  The students did really well with this game as well, and they enjoyed doing it.  The only element that would have made our Kahoot better would have been if we had enough time to review every question we had.  At this point, we were worried that the students were not going to have enough time to complete their webquest so we just had the students answer each of the questions.

After, the Kahoot the students began their webquest.  They were answering the questions we gave them using the resources that were linked in the webquest.  The students did a really good job of
using the resources they had appropriately to answer all of the questions.  The students worked on answering the five questions for about 15 minutes and then they began working on their independent practice.

For independent practice we had the students write a journal article for their school newspaper.  The audience who was reading their journal article did not know anything about the Constitution so, they had to be very deatiled and include information from their webquest and any other prior knowledge.  The students worked on their articles for about 10 minutes then we had one person from each group share their article. 

The students who read had written wonderful, descriptive articles.  They really paid a lot of attention to the fact that it was a journal article and they wrote them in such a way that you felt like you were actually reading a newspaper.  We were very proud of all of the articles the students had written.

The students in this class are very intelligent and creative.  I am looking forward to teaching the cooperative learning lesson next Tuesday.  This is the first time my group and I have taught a cooperative learning lesson so, we are looking forward to experiencing that and seeing the projects that all of the students come up with! Until Tuesday, Bishop Dunn!