A recent trip to Zion, Bryce, and the Grand Canyon National Parks inspired me to design this student project. Upon returning from my trip, I surveyed some of my classes and discovered that besides the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone, most students had little knowledge of the many treasures that are a part of the U.S. National Park system.
This project was designed to help students use a variety of technology tools, to learn to do online research, and to create a web page using a wiki. I also wanted to offer opportunities for differentiated instruction where students had choices of various technology related activities to complete.
I did this project with 6th graders in the fall of 2008 and repeated it with a second group of 6th graders during the next quarter. I've detailed each of the activities we did on the following pages. One could easily select specific parts of the project to do and could adapt many of the activities for a different research topic.
PBS is planning to air Ken Burn's new documentary "The National Parks: America's Best Idea" in the fall of 2009 so I anticipate that there will be renewed interest in studying the US National Parks!
I plan to repeat the project in the fall of 2009 and hope to have other classes join us! It would be exciting to expand this project to cover national parks in countries around the world. Please see the "Invitation to Participate" link on the right if you would like to join the project.
First published on Mar 10, 2009.
