National Park Project

In literacy, the kids have spent the past few weeks working on the multi-disciplinary National Park Project. For this project they have used their research and reading skills to plan a trip to one of America's National Parks. Now, they are honing their writing skills creating a travel journal of their imaginary trip. They are also gaining background knowledge about the land features that we are going to learn about in science in the coming weeks.

Rangers from the National Park Service were kind enough to send us packages of resources from their visitor centers so that the kid could use authentic resources to plan their trip. We got packages of notes and info from as far away as Denali National Park in Alaska! One of the things we were learning in this unit was how to find information from a variety of different text features (maps, charts, titles, sidebars, illustrations, captions etc.). These resources were chock-full of all kinds of interesting text features. Here's some photos of the kids digging into their research:

Now that they have gathered their information they're in the process of creating a travel journal of their imaginary trip. For this writing assignment they need to practice their narrative writing skills (descriptive details and plot) as well as using text features to tell their story. These journals are due on December 7th. So far, I've been blown away by the creative way they they have been using text features to tell their stories. I can't wait to see the finished products! Here's some pictures of them in progress: