The project
After working on infographics with the Year 5 class and helping the Middle School teachers use infographics in their lessons I wanted to see how it would work with year 4 students. The students were doing research on immigration emigration and migration of people as part of their Unit of Inquiry. In math they were focusing on charts and graphs. This combination led perfectly to having the students work on infographics. The students were divided in groups and were given a country to research. The countries were chosen based on the high number of immigrants from each country in Italy. They were asked to look at the statistics and inquire about the reasons for their countries immigration and emigration statistics.
The process
- I did an introductory lesson on Infographics and gave the students and opportunity to explore the piktochart.com and infogr.am websites.
- The students were then free to choose between the two sites for their infographics. All groups chose infogr.am because of the wider selection of graphs and charts that could be used.
- We gave the students countries to research for and directed them to a few websites where they could find the information:
- We discussed the expectations with the students for the visual presentations.
- They needed represent their data in a clear and understandable way
- They needed to keep the images and graphics on topic.
- They needed to cite their sources
- We asked the students to answer the following questions
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What is the population of these countries?
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Where are the countries?
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What countries and bodies of water surround these countries?
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Where do the people from these countries emigrate to?
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How many people emigrate from these countries?
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- When the students had finished collecting their information they began inserting the information into their infographic.
Assessment
- To assess we are using observational notes and a rubric.
Reflection
This was a very successful unit, in large part because of the collaboration with the classroom teachers. We all worked together and held only co-taught lessons. This had a huge advantage, it allowed the teachers to get first hand knowledge with the software which in turn allowed them to work throughout the week directly with the students on the project.
