Trash+vs.+Treasure

Notetaking during inquiry projects can be an overwhelming task for elementary students. The key to managing fact overload is to skillfully decide what is necessary and what is not. I call it separating "Trash from Treasure." This concept goes well with dodging plagairism concerns since the students record the golden nuggets of information rather than copying full sentences. It also prevents overwriting. The advanced students will be able to extract meaning from a series of sentences and synthesize them into a fresh statement.

Have your students access ReadWriteThink's [|Fact Fragment Frenzy]to see how important finding those treasures are, and the worked spared by avoiding the trash.


 * View demo together
 * Select an aminal to model your thinking (I liked the chameleon one - before and after screen shots below - because I was able to reorganize the information merging the opening info with the closing info which demonstrate how note taking isn't always linear. Students need to see how research needs to be separated into catagories of related information)
 * Students can select a different animal for independent practice. They can print their final result for a technology and research grade.

The sooner they learn this lesson, the better. They will be writing research papers the rest of their educational lives. ;-)