6. How did this relate to the rest of
your curriculum?
Well, of course, in English when they were writing their travel
journal, we had to look at, of course, all the correct usage of
grammar and punctuation, and all that counted when they did their
work. So, they couldn't just write down anything and hand it in
and have that be acceptable. We looked at what we consider to be
quality writing, that is something someone else could read and gather
information from. Our first few attempts the students did have to
do over again, because they weren't quite sure what constituted
a good journal page that someone else could gather information from.
In English we went over what is a good descriptive paragraph and
how to write a good descriptive paragraph. In math we went over
a spreadsheet. Now I created the formulas for the spreadsheet, because
I felt that was a little bit beyond my fifth graders. But again,
they had to input the information and check it and make sure it
was accurate. I am not beyond making a mistake. Maybe their spreadsheet
wasn't accurate. They had to do that sort of work. They also had
to calculate how far it was from one city to another city. They
were using maps in geography to decide those things. They had to
look at maps and read them. Some of the kids got extra credit, because
they would actually find a map of the city and route their route.
Some of them used a piece of software called Automap to do that.
But then they laid the map out on an actual map that they drew,
so they had those sort of things that they worked on. All that,
of course, relates to our curriculum directly. Then art—drawing
and making accurate depiction and creating a sign that gives information
that can be read and is clear. It kind of cut across the whole curriculum
in a lot of different ways.
