Above the Line in Elementary

I teach fourth grade in California which means I teach all about California history and geography. Traditionally my students have completed a research report on the four regions of California as a way to practice research, notetaking, and expository writing skills while covering the Social Studies standards. We would finish our unit by sculpting and painting salt-flour dough maps. traditional research report - not too exciting messy and disconnected from the content I wanted my students to understand about each region I realized this project needed a redesign. Enter Google Classroom and Google MyMaps! To begin the research portion of the project, I provided a note-taking guide and a HyperDoc that outlined the whole project. We used a combination of online sources and our textbook.  Rough drafts were typed in a Google Doc that was assigned in Google Classroom. We worked on writing and editing our expository paragraphs in the Google Doc and this became the co