Documenting Hands-On Projects

Hands-on projects come in all sorts of varieties. Sometimes they are just getting out plastic soldiers and setting up a battle scene for explanation of some aspect of military strategy. Sometimes it is completing an art project that relates to topics in other areas such as science or history. Usually those projects only take one day at the most. And then, there are more extensive hands-on projects that take several days to complete. The archaeology dig projects (cake archaeologysandbox-Lego archaeology) were in the last category. They spent some time one day setting them up, another day digging them out, a third day sketching the finds. There were days in between those activity days as well so that they had time to contemplate and assimilate what they were learning. The last piece of the project was documenting the project in their history notebooks.
Student's (age 9) notebook page, with history and science narrations of just a couple sentences.
 They began documenting the project by putting some photos I had printed out on a page and then writing a title with bubble writing. Then they wrote a sentence or two, describing what was in the pictures.
 One student had worked on verbs this week in English, so I asked him to pick out some verbs (as well as one adjective) to use as captions for one of his history notebook pages.
A student wrote a couple of sentence narration for his caption for this page.

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