The Great State Mystery
Short Description
Did you ever want to be a detective? This online collaborative project gives elementary students the opportunity to use deductive reasoning skills to find their fellow project participants. This project incorporates math, geography, science, language arts and social studies into fun-filled lessons and activities that will send your students on a journey across the United States.
Subject
Technology Needed
Internet access and email.
Time Commitment
This project has a set of daily lesson plans and activities during the first three weeks of the project. Approximately half an hour to an hour is required each to complete each day's work. The final week provides teachers additional time to complete the classroom activities and submit work to be displayed online.
Registration Information
Register your classroom online to participate in the Great State Mystery. Please do not sign up until you are confidant that you will be able to participate and obey all project deadlines. Other classrooms will be counting on you.
Registration Deadline
March 1st, 2001
Full Project Description
This collaborative project gives students the opportunity to gather and analyze data about different participating states throughout the country in the form of clues. Using deductive reasoning skills, students identify a classroom's location by process of elimination. All throughout this process, the students use fractions to calculate how many of the states were eliminated with each clue. As the students gather their clues, perform calculations and modify their predictions, they may record their progress in individual journals.
Once students have, to the best of their ability, identified the state where the classroom in question is located, students make a verbal presentation to their own classmates explaining how they formulated their conclusion. This presentation is in fact, their final answer, after which, the mystery state is revealed.
Once the mystery state is revealed, your classroom may choose to identify the exact location of the school in question by using more clues or by the triangulation method. Using the knowledge about the state that the students have identified, the Create-A-Plate Lesson gives them a chance to apply their new found knowledge about this state and express their artistic skills by designing a license plate to be submitted to the project web site.
The project has been developed for elementary level students, but can be adapted for use in higher level classrooms. The project will encompass a wide range of subject areas including math, science, social studies and language arts.
To help guide your students through this project, please refer to the individual daily lesson plans in the Teacher Area. You may use as many of these lessons as needed. In order to support as many classrooms as possible, flexibility is given to the teacher to adapt the lessons and activities to suit particular classroom needs. If you are interested in the project, please read the project requirements below.
Project Objectives
Social Studies
Students will use various maps of the United States during this project. These maps will be available to the students in various forms from which they will both collect data and keep track of their findings. All the while, students will practice skills identifying and naming various states.
Science
Students use the Scientific Method throughout this project. In addition, students will gain knowledge about different animal species that they research.
Language Arts
Students will maintain a writing journal. Students will record their gathered information and express their thoughts in their journal during the project run. Assessment of student's progress will be measured by the information collected in their journal.
Math
Students will gain skills using fractions and percents. Drill and practice using fractions and percentage is built into this project as a process of elimination is used to identify their mystery state. As students eliminate states, they have the opportunity to calculate the exact fraction (and percent) of states that have been eliminated in each round of clues.
Assessment
A complete set of rubrics are proved on the site.
Sponsored by
This project has been developed by Patrice Enyart and Alberta Weissman, teachers from CJR/#9, Paterson in conjunction with CIESE at Stevens Institute of Technology, Bank Street College, and St. Peter's College with support through an Eisenhower Professional Development Program that is administered by the New Jersey State Department of Education
