Revolutionary War Project

You will be doing a research project about the Revolutionary War. You will research people, battles, and events. This project will include a title page, table of contents, illustrations, and a bibliography. Except for the bibliography, all of your work must be typed.

How do I choose topics? You can choose topics using books about the Revolutionary War that I will have available to you in the classroom. You can use your Social Studies textbook to find names of people, battles, and events. You just can’t use it for research information. You can use the internet at home with your parents’ permission to search for people, places and events of the Revolutionary War.

You must put your information in your own words! Why can’t you copy someone else’s words?

That is called plagiarism. It is stealing. Plagiarism is stealing someone else’s words just like if you stole someone’s song, artwork, or homework paper and said it was yours. You have to change the words into your own words. Just changing one or two words in a sentence is not enough. We will learn more about this in a library lesson later.

How will you know if I copy something word for word?

Most of the time, 5 th grade writing sounds like 5 th grade writing. If your words don’t sound like words you would understand, I will probably ask you to explain it to me. I can take a sentence of your work and type it into google or to many plagiarism websites and it will tell me exactly were it was copied from. You will receive a ZERO for plagiarized work.

Where will I find all of this information? You will use the books and encyclopedias I have in the classroom. You will use the resources in our school library. We will go to the school library as a class about 6 times to do research for this project. You may also request to go when we have extra time or during recess. We will have many times when we can use ipads in the classroom to do research. You might also consider asking an adult to take you to the Moore Public Library if you need extra time or resources to do your work.

How will I know what information to look for? You will be given pages on which to take notes for each of your people, battles, and events. Theses pages will give you certain information that you need to look for and take notes on as well as other things you might choose to look for. The note pages will have to be turned in on due dates that will be given to you so that I can check your progress. Having these completed will be part of your grade.

How do I find pictures? You can draw pictures. You can cut out pictures and glue them on. You can cut and paste them from the computer. We will learn how to do this if you don’t know how. Each of your topics will need to have a paragraph followed by a picture that goes with that paragraph. For example, if you write a paragraph about George Washington then you will follow it with a picture of George Washington. You do not have to site your sources for the pictures.

What if I don’t do it? The signed parent slip is worth 100 points, topics 100 points, people notes 100 points, battle notes 100 points, and event notes 100 points. The finished project is worth another 200 points. If you choose not to complete these, you will lose 700 points. You will not be able to pass Social Studies.

What if I don’t have a computer at home to type on? We will not have enough time at school for everyone to type their reports at school. If you have a computer at home, you need to type it at home. If you do not have a computer at home, you will need to complete your research early and let me know that you need to type at school. You may have to spend some recess time or come in before or after school to get it all done. Do not wait until the week it is due! You might also consider going to the Moore Public Library to type. Remember that you can use google docs to type so that you can save it and type again from any computer.

What if I have a computer but no printer? If you can type it at home but cannot print it, you can it to me or bring it to me on a flash drive. If you do this, get it to me at least a day ahead of the due date in case there is some problem with receiving or reading it. If there is a problem and you did not get it to me early, your project will be late!

Why are you making us do this???

You will learn things about the Revolutionary War that we will not have time to cover in class and you will remember much more because you researched it yourself. You will learn a lot about how to do research, how to write, how to site your sources, and how to put together a large project that you can be proud of. You will have to do many more projects like this and much more difficult than this in the future

What if I cry?

I will give you a tissue!