Report Writing - Researching

Now that we are completely revolted-out by instructional writing, we are now moving onto writing reports.  Yesterday we sat down and talked about the purpose of writing a report - to share information, to educate, and to find out.

We decided we would write reports on an animal of choice - not a typical cat or dog, but a type of animal that it would be interesting to learn about.

As a group, we set the criteria of what the structure of our report would look like:

1. title
2. introduction - animal, classification, country it is found, size, predator/prey
3. habitat - where it lives
4. diet - what it eats
5. body covering - fur/feathers/scales/skin - can it camouflage?
6. life cycle
7. interesting facts
8. conclusion - is it endangered?

We made a small booklet to keep our notes in.  Students then decided what animal they wanted to find out more about.

• Chelsea - cheetah
• Gideon - leopard
• Ella - serval
• Matt - meerkat
• Ethan - praying mantis
• Shaun - salt water crocodile
• Ms. M - orca

However, we also discussed that this might change, depending on the availability of information we could find.

Today we went to the BIS library to start our research about our animals.  We got out encyclopaedias and found that most animal information is located in the non-fiction section around the 590s.

Next, we walked down to Infused in Stoke to have a hot chocolate (needed by all budding writers to help with inspiration :) ) and discussed what a bibliography was, its purpose, and what information is needed.  We also talked about how we were going to find information in the texts we find:

- use an index

- look for main ideas in the text that covered the categories we had selected

- make short notes in our booklet under the titles (we can write full sentences later)

- use skimming and scanning techniques to find specific information

Our next stop was Stoke Library where a lovely librarian gave us a lot of her time and helped us source books on our various animals.  Gideon, Ethan and Shaun found that they needed to change their topic (leopard, praying mantis, saltwater crocodile) and then were able to find more information for their report.

Unfortunately, time just went too quickly.  We are hoping to make a return trip tomorrow to get more information from the books we found - at least we now know where to find them!  What a lovely morning out doing some writing!!


Ms. M