Finding Quality Research for Your Social Action Picture Book

Your job in the lab today is to find and print out research on your social action topic so that you can be an informed, educated author who children and trust and believe.  You should have your completed K/W chart and directions in front of you.  This blog post is meant to be an online guide.

1. Revisit the blog post we used for our general social action webquest. Many of those websites will lead you to organizations whose own website has an "overview" that can serve as an article, specific case studies you may want to print and read or even additional websites to check out.

2. Visit M.S. 51's Library Homepage. "Worldbook" may have a great overview for you, "Proquest" may guide you toward interesting articles and "Opposing Viewpoints" might be an interesting read if your topic is controversial (it will show you both sides).  I will have the passwords on the board in the lab.

3. Finally, try a search engine like "google" or "ask." (Remember that these ARE NOT WEBSITES.  You cannot cite "google" on a bibliography.) Use key words about your topic to help you  narrow down all that is on the world wide web: words like "organization," or "nonprofit" alongside your topic may help you get to a website that has solid overviews. 

REMINDERS:

• Make sure your research in CURRENT (the article is from the past few years).  

• Print only what you will READ--it is ok to copy and paste the parts that are relevant to you onto a Word document.  

• As a back up, save your documents in googledocs OR send yourself an email of the websites you are using (have an open email to yourself and just copy and paste the link in the body of the email), just in case!

• Staple all articles to your K/W paper.  We will begin our reading in class together.  

• You will be creating a bibliography for your picture book, so you MUST write down the source of the information.