Who wants to go on vacation? My webquest allows this third grade class to do just that – to another planet in our solar system! I created this lesson to teach the students scientific knowledge about the planets, online research skills, and core competencies in writing. They were also given the assignment of designing a creative project that would be presented to their fellow classmates, both to develop their own oral communication skills and help the other students learn about the planet they want to visit.
Learning about, and then creating, a webquest has been a very rewarding and educational experience. Webquests are great tools, especially for the young students who have limited research skills, in that they can provide guidance as to where to look for information. Students in the early elementary years would be best served in learning how to navigate websites for relevant information instead of navigating the entire internet for relevant websites. I limited the number of research tools, while providing access to sites that included all of the information that the students would need for this lesson. For students that were interested in learning more about the solar system, I included additional links in the conclusion section for further study.
As a first step, each student is to identify the planet that they would like to visit on vacation. There are two online research links provided for each planet, as well as a third online link that compares and contrasts each of the planets. After choosing their planet, the students have a choice of whether to create a travel poster, brochure, or PowerPoint presentation to later present to the class. Using their research skills, they will respond to the prompting questions in the lesson to create this project and will then write a one page paper to reflect on why they want to visit this planet. To promote higher level thinking, the students will also give an oral presentation to the class so that everyone can learn about what they have done.
I thoroughly enjoyed creating this webquest, and I choose a subject that was also pertinent to my own child’s learning at this time as well. When I presented my first draft, my daughter told me it was too simple and that I should include a writing portion in addition to just creating a poster. This gave me the idea to also include an oral presentation task so that students would be exposed to the information at various levels. I have always felt that teaching others increases my own learning exponentially and, since public speaking is such a great fear for many, it would expose the students to this medium at an early age.
The only real problem that I faced when completing this webquest was finding child-friendly sites that weren’t oversimplified in their design and that provided relevant content for student research. It took some time, but I am extremely satisfied with the end result and my daughter gave it a thumbs-up as well. The only other problem that I faced was the timing out of the questgarden.com site due to weather-related internet issues. After losing some of the project, I learned to keep hitting save every few minutes but realized that this could happen in the school setting as well. To circumvent this, the students would be better served if the webquest (and its related links) were made available in an offline format to also combat any issues with limited online classroom access at the school.
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