Today was a lot of fun. Last year I came in as a one day shadow and helped to create a WebQuest on "The Watsons go to Birmingham" for 6th grade LA classes. Today we were using the WebQuest! A class came in each period all day and we (the teacher, Marian, and I) circulated through the students and helped them not only stay on task, but explained how it worked.
View the WebQuest here!
They start out choosing a car (either a car with good gas mileage but cramped or a big car that will take a lot of money to fill up). They then use mapquest to plan out the route and pick a stopping point. They look up average gas prices to determine how much a tank of gas would cost, and how far they could get on one tank. They picked a place to stop for lunch (either fast food, picnic site, or sit down restaurant) and they needed to add in the cost for this to their budget. They then had to re-calculate mileage for the gas based on their stop location, and how far they could go on this tank of gas.
A lot of the problems were about keeping the students on task. They had a hard time reading what they were supposed to be doing, even though the directions were very clear and walked them through each step slowly. By the second half of the day we learned to keep them on task by reading the instructions for each step for them out loud. There had been a part where the students discuss why they chose a certain car on a twitter-like site, but they abused this with inappropriate language so it had to come down.
The students really seem to enjoy it, but it does take two class periods to finish the entire quest. We created graphic organizers for each student to print out to keep track of each item, and they do a great job filling these out. It helps to keep them on task and move them through the lesson. It also helped us know what they had done the day before and where we needed to pick up with each class.
I loved being able to see this lesson through from start to finish. I now want to create more WebQuest for the media center.
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