We started our project with the KWL chart. Students brainstormed all the facts they already knew about sharks and formulated research questions. Then students formed small teams, picked a research question, explored pre-selected websites about sharks and made notes. We also read books about sharks, watched sharks in movies, read jokes about sharks and even listened to a shark song.

Taking notes was the most demanding part of the project. We looked together at all the students’ notes and discussed different techniques of taking notes. We learned why we can’t make notes by copying word by word from a book or from the internet. We discussed the concept of plagiarism.

Here is an example of our Note Taking Exercise.

Creating a presentation in PowerPoint was the most exciting part of the project. Students learned to create hyperlinks, use the animation scheme and record their voices.

Let me point out that all the members of the Library Club, except one, are ESL children. They are all third grade students.

Here is our PowerPoint presentation about sharks.

Internet resources used in this project are available on our Shark Resource Page.

As a part of this project we created a podcast with shark jokes. We created our MP3 file with jokes in Audacity and turned it into a podcast with ClickCaster. If you want to know more about these software applications visit the page on podcasts in SharkBytes Wiki.

Click the icon to listen to our Shark Jokes. Have fun!