I have always been fascinated with National Parks. In truth, I haven’t been to that many. I grew up in California, so I’ve been to Yosemite, Redwood, Lassen, and have been to a few in Utah and also the Grand Canyon. Someday I’d love to travel around and visit a bunch of new parks.
National Parks are perfect for teaching about research writing or informational writing. I love doing biographies and state projects, but National Parks are a little unique, while still providing many different parks for each student to research. When teaching a research project, there are a few specific lessons that I like to focus on.
Research Writing Lesson Topics
Identifying Main Idea and Details
- Students need to be able to identify the main idea and details in writing so that they also know how to write with main ideas and details when they go to write their own paper. I do this by practicing together making a concept map. We also start with a main idea and have then come up with details that would go along with it. You can also have students highlight the main idea of a passage with one color and the details with another.
Determining Importance
- There is a lot of important information in a nonfiction text, but not all of it is relevant to the topic. Learning to separate the information that is relevant or not is key to having focused writing that stays on track. One way to practice this is by teaching students to highlight and annotate the important information. I teach a specific method for doing this, but there are many different ways that can work.
Text Features
- In order to fully understand nonfiction text and be able to do quality research, students have to understand how to use text features. When I was a kid (and sometimes still), I would skip all of the text headings and just jump to the main text. Then I found myself having to backtrack to try and figure out what the passage was talking about. If I had read the heading first, I would have had some context about what I was supposed to be learning during that section. We go over a bunch of different nonfiction text features here. The students often know most of them, but sometimes they aren’t able to use them correctly still, so we do some practice pages with a few different types of text features.
Taking Notes
- This lesson is a big one. To do any type of research writing, you have to know how to take quality notes. Many teachers do this in different ways. For this project about national parks, I break the research up into specific topics, like plants/animals, features of the land, etc. so that students have a focused page to write their notes on. Another way to do it is to write each fact on sticky notes or index cards.
Integrating Information
- The last lesson I go over in research writing (before actually teaching the writing part) is to integrate information from multiple sources. This is hard. It’s easy to use one source and find a bunch of information, but totally different to get information from multiple places. One that is key is teaching students to notice the difference in the types of writing from different sources. Is one written in more of a narrative form, or very factual? To learn this concept, I have students read two passages about the same topic, side by side. They highlight information that is the same (or similar) in both passages in one color, and highlight information that is unique in each passage in a different color. Then they can pick and choose information from each source to use in their writing.
Research Writing on National Parks
After letting students research for a while, we are finally ready to put it all together. The students take their research and write a paragraph on each of the topics they research. This can take a few days. I also keep a revising and editing checklist handy. Students always finish at a different rate, so students that are finished can begin revising and editing whenever they are ready. Then I have them revise and edit with a partner as well.
I like to use a rubric for the whole writing project so students know exactly what is expected.
You can use these same writing lessons for any research topic, but if you’re interesting in your students learning about national parks, I’ll drop some links below to the unit specifically shown in the pictures. Happy researching!
