Tech Support for Research Projects

In my second grade classroom we are knee deep in a unit on Space.  This week we have been researching the 8 planets in our Solar System.  Research has been a breeze for this project thanks to the recently discovered MentorMob website I found via the Kleinspiraton blog.  With MentorMob you can forget about spending oodles of class time looking for content suitable for your wee ones.  MentorMob allows you to create playlists with videos and websites that you have researched and are confident contains appropriate content.  You can embed your playlist right into your Blog, Edmodo or Wiki page and direct your students to head there.  Here is the playlist my second graders are using at the moment. This playlist was created by another teacher and made available to all MentorMob users which is something I love about the website.  You can create your own playlists to individualize instruction across the curriculum as well.

Create your own Playlist on MentorMob!

If teaching your students how to search for information is one of the areas you want to focus on during a research project then you might want to give the kid safe search engine Kidrex.org a look.  My first grade son and my second grade students use it with ease and all the content we have come across has been safe and appropriate for children.

More Research and Reading

Yesterday I posted about the awesome research strategy I had found in Ralph Fletcher's book, Non-Fiction Craft lessons: Teaching Information Writing K-8.  I am still really excited about that strategy, but noticed yesterday afternoon that most of my students were only focusing on one, maybe two, of the categories for their habitat research.  I started brainstorming and came up with a visual for them to use that would help them organize their notes and let them see if they had facts about each category.  I find that the more hands on and visual the better this class does.  I took a large piece of butcher paper and folded it into fourths.  Then I labeled each square with the categories the children are supposed to be finding information for.  One of our research groups volunteered to organize their facts on their chart for us this morning.  They discovered that they only had information for the animals that lived in their habitat.  "Uh-oh!" they said.  This afternoon they are more focused and more confident!

Rachel said, "This helped me and Tel a lot because we were only finding the animal facts."