Selection 1: Your Research Articles, Part 2 of Research Planning


Big idea: It’s important that we be smart, strategic consumers of information. In order to make sense of and navigate the endless flow of information greeting us every day, we need skills and strategies. Your goal for this unit is to not only improve how and why you read, but to also create meaningful texts to communicate to others the inferences you made and conclusions you reached.

Learning outcome: After doing the activities below, you will know how to find an appropriate article for use on your final project. You will also get practice citing the article.

Topics and themes: Recall from the Fences unit that you spent time learning about the difference between a topic and a theme. For your website, you will be exploring one topic in several different ways. That means that you will likely produce materials and share information that explore many themes! It’s tempting to want to try out a few topics before getting started, but for this project, you need to just choose one and get started!

Fences	The Bean Trees
family dynamics parents-children racism sports heritage/ tools from parents government/power	family dynamics parents-children the families you create immigration the Cherokee nation        government/power
What else can you think of?  Choose something you have questions about and go for it!

Tips for researching your topic: Do you remember working with questions as you planned your essay in Fences and learned about various grammar rules? Try those strategies with your topic. 

	Assignment:  Write down your topic and then write questions about the topic to give you starting points on your article. Your questions should be in the domains of: what? who? why? and when?
Example: Topic: Kids/ Social Media Question 1. What are some opinions - and opposing views on kids’ use of social media? Where can I learn about kids’ perspectives on it? What forms of social media are the most popular? Question 2. Who is an expert about this subject? What have they written about it? Question 3. When did social media really increase? What generation(s) does it affect? Question 4. Besides articles, what other forms of commentary on social media are available? (Political cartoons that feature it; videos on it; the forms of social media themselves.)

Tips for finding an article:

Start with the search engine/database/ website

1. Log into your school’s database. Most librarians post the passwords and codes to the databases in their Bb site.

2. Use scholar.google.com to look for articles

3. Go to a newspaper’s main website and look for an article (*note -- don’t use articles in opinions for this activity) Use your questions to find sources

Examples: What types of social media are most popular?; Political cartoons & twitter

After you find the article, use it to complete this chart. Paste your topic + questions and the chart into your assignment sheet.

Link to FCPS LIS Databases