SIRS

As I looked over the SIRS Discoverer and the SIRS Researcher databases I began to think of the topics our students usually researched for their classes each year. The 7th graders do country reports for geography and their Spanish exploratory class. The Language Arts classes just finished a Vietnam War timeline. The science classes are beginning to talk about a Science Fair. I used these databases to research these topics to see how a student would use them. I shared this information with the Spanish teacher who will use the "graphic organizer" for his project.
For the answer to the questions on the challenge I used Armadillos for the subject and liked the way the articles were labeled (easy, moderate, challenge) At a glance a student can see which articles might be more difficult to read. The citation for each article is provided at the end. The only draw back to this database is that there are no pictures to go with the articles.
On SIRS Researcher I looked at the Curriculum Pathfinders--Fine Arts and had fun with the Artopia site. It provides interactive activities regarding painting, artists, and critiquing art. On this site you can even have fun with Math!
So often our students begin their research with a "google" search of a term or phrase. This works sometimes but too much time is spent going through the thousands of articles and pieces of information.
My goal is to share this site with our students and show them that others have taken the time to find articles and organized them here for us to use.