CASE STUDY: CONDUCTING RESEARCH ON COLONIAL AMERICANS
In the second unit, students further develop their ability to comprehend informational text by hearing and reading a variety of nonfiction sources about roles people played in a colonial settlement (e.g., blacksmith, wheelwright, printer, and cooper) and how necessary their interdependence was for survival. To build students’ background knowledge, the class will work together to study the wheelwright, a colonial trade. They will then work in research Expert Groups as they become experts in one specific colonial trade. Students will select from: shoemaker, cooper, blacksmith, builder/carpenter, or printer.
Students will study a variety of informational texts and also will learn the importance of citing sources by keeping a list of the key sources they used during their research. With an emphasis on making inferences, summarizing informational text, and basic research (note-taking, pulling together information from a variety of texts, and sorting information into research categories), students synthesize information from multiple sources. This research will serve as the foundation for their culminating performance task (in Unit 3).
