Science Expo

Each year my 5th grade students complete science projects and share them in the form of a science expo. We have started to prepare our science expo projects which consist of the students doing research on a topic of their choice and then creating either a model, doing an experiment, or completing some sort of project to go along with their topic. They are also to find an expert in this field and contact them in some way. This has allowed me to teach them about how we can use e-mail to contact different people and how they can professionally contact them online. After they have their research done they start to write a research paper. This gives me the opportunity to teach the students how to write a research paper and cite their sources using a bibliography. I have decided to use GoogleDocs this year and to have the students share their papers with me so I can correct them online and share them back with them with the corrections. This will give the students a taste of communicating online with each other. I have also had the students start using Kidblog to blog about their progress weekly. So far this is going very well and the students are very engaged in this project. I am looking forward to seeing how this all plays out. By the end of this project the students will have created a project board, a model or experiment, written a research paper, and blogged about their process. This should be a very good learning experiment on many different concepts.