Fail: Research Project

This is the word that comes to mind when I think about my research unit, which concluded last week:

Okay, fail may be a little harsh.  But when I read this post, I want to laugh out loud at how hopeful I was that this year, I would feel differently about this unit.  I don't.  I truly hate this project.  In fact, I joked to my husband that we need to schedule the birth of our next child so that I can be on maternity leave during this unit next year.  I'm tempted to use this post to rant and rave about why, but I'm resisting.  Instead, I'm going to reflect on what went wrong and what I can do net year to make it better.

Take Aways:

• Don't miss a day of school in the middle of research. I was sick a day and it cost my kids, because apparently my sub told them to work and then let them go instead of monitoring their progress.  When I returned and told them they had to have all their research done by the next day, it didn't go over well.
• Do a better job of monitoring their research questions. They were supposed to write three questions about their event before they began their research.  I looked over them before they researched, but I didn't get to bothered about bad questions because I wanted the questions to change as the kids did their research.  What I didn't foresee was that 1) they wouldn't, and 2) they wouldn't know to ask the very basic question "What happened?"  So next year, we will spend more time on writing good questions. 
• Do a better job of explaining that typing "What was the effect of Abraham Lincoln's assassination?" into a google browser will probably not get them the most sound of sources.  Most answers like this would pop up Yahoo! answers or Wiki Answers, and it seemed that no matter how many times I explained that these were not valid sources of information, kids kept using them!

Maybe this unit wasn't really a fail.  The kids did learn how to research, write a works cited page, write a summary paragraph using their questions as main ideas, and do a creative project over their research.  This last one is a new thing and I am really enjoying them.  One student nearly made me cry with her poem about the Holocaust.  Maybe I should think about it from that perspective.  The really good news is that I don't have to worry about it for 11 and a half more months!