1.+ABC+Culture+Book

 Last Year!!
==During the 2007-08 school year Erin had her students learn about different countries by using the Culturegrams website and Power Point. She had a little experience using power point with students so this was her year to experiment and learn the logistics of having her entire class saving, working with, and sharing presentations. Many students shared their presentations at our district technology fair.==

What Next?
==This year she looked at the project again and wanted to give the students some higher level thinking skills rather than simply researching and sharing information. We spent a half day planning out a timeline, rubrics, samples, and gathering resources.==

==Her students worked together to create a class book called the ABC"s of North America. Each student was responsible for a topic based on a letter of the alphabet. One of the topics was dining. That student's job was to examine the dining habits of each of the three North American countries, Canada, USA, and Mexico.==

The student needed to make connections between the countries and their main topic. They then had to peer review their ideas and rough draft their paragraphs explaining each connection.
==After examining many published ABC books and looking for the common layout features on each page, the students worked in Publisher to create a layout based on their class decisions about how their book would look.They would type up their paragraphs and gather images to add to their two page spread.==

[|Culturgrams website] a place where kids can research information about their country.

==** Rubrics ** -  ==
 * 1) [|research rubric.doc]- what were students able to do when resefor diningarching their topic?
 * 2) [[file:rough draft rubric.doc]] Do students accurately incorporate the information following writing conventions into a paragraph?
 * 3) [[file:final page rubric.doc]]- How does each page look? Are there images and written work artfully displayed?

Student Samples-

 * [|D is for dining.pdf]
 * [[file:F is for flags.pdf]]
 * [[file:Gg IS for gulf and bay.pdf]]