Explorers Project, 4th Grade

This was a group project that my students composed last year while I taught fourth grade. It was a fun project that they completed after CST's, and kept the students learning, while having fun!

The students were broken up into groups of 6 for the project, and they each had specific tasks.

Map Expert: This person drew the map for where the explorer sailed.

Timeline Expert: This person made the timeline of the person's life.

Early Life Expert: This person researched the early life of the person, and wrote the paragraph as well.

The Contributions Expert: This person researched and found information on what the explorers did, and where they explored. Then wrote the paragraph about it.

Later Life Expert: This person researched what they did after they were an explorer.

If there was a odd person out, they would write the final draft of the essay, and be the assistant to the researchers.

The students were allowed to research on the computers in the room, or use their social studies book.

The students researched: Vitus Bering, Sebastian Vizcaino, Juan Cabrillo, Gaspar De Portola, Sir Francis Drake, and Hernando Cortez.

After their projects were complete (what is pictured above). The students did a presentation on the person. Each person had to present on a different part of the person's life, so they had to learn from their experts. We invited another class to come watch the presentations, and it was a huge success! The absolutely loved showing off all their hard work!

Transition to the Common Core

Our district is slowly piloting the common core standard by standard. My first focus was this, Reading Standard for literature 5.1: 1. Quote accurately from a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.


Something I have already created for my students as a tool to take notes is a playbook. The playbook consists of sentence frames, vocabulary notes, grammar notes, vocabulary/decoding/word work skills. It usually gives room for the students to write while we read our stories. 

What I have pictured to the right is a page from my playbook, that focuses on the comprehension strategy of questioning. The students I had worked in partner groups. After reading a page they were to write a question that could be answered from the story. Then, they would switch pages. They would then answer their partners question, but the catch was that they had to quote accurately the information from the story. 

The frame I gave them to start with was this: ________(answer the question)______, and I know this because on page _____ it says "____(where the answer is in the story)___." 

Now we are starting incorporate the quote into the answer to sound more sophisticated. It is tough at first, but once the students saw a few good examples they did a better answering questions. Now, they are truly getting it down, and we can quote accurately doing any comprehension strategy!

Also, my favorite part about this, is that I had students start doing this with a non-fiction science text automatically, which is the Reading Strategy Informational Text 5.1. And, these were EL students! It was cool to give them this power!