Overview of Project

Inform students that a new Dust Bowl is forming in Oklahoma. Many residents there are too young to remember the first Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The town of Boise City, Oklahoma, has called for a Town Hall, where they will inform citizens of the causes of the first Dust Bowl. They have asked students, who have recently studied the first Dust Bowl, to create a presentation for the Town Hall describing the causes and effects of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

Advanced readers can read about the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma on the National Geographic website.

Teacher Support:

Have your students show their learning with Google Slides

How to Make Google Slides Projects with Students - YouTube

Rubric: 

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PROJECT ACTIVITIES

Activity 1: Copyright

"Copyright and Creativity for Ethical Digital Citizens" has lesson plans for grades K-6 with short animations to support learning.  Check out the lesson plans here.

Teachers who want to brush up on copyright as it pertains to the classroom can check out our online professional development course: Copyright for Teachers.

Activity 2: Finding Creative Common Images

Most school districts and public libraries have resources on finding Creative Commons images, but this guide from Harvard Law School has an extensive list of sites teachers can use and steer their students to when looking for Creative Commons images.

Activity 3: Learning to Cite Images 

Download Worksheet Directions and Example,   Download Page 2

Students as young as first grade can learn the reasons why we always give credit for work that isn’t ours. Kathy Schrock’s Research and Style Manual provides a special section of scaffolding citation format for grades 1-6. Grades 7-12 should be required to use full citation formatting. Below is the suggested format fourth graders should be expected to use for images:

1. Creators last name, first name.
2. Description or title of the image, in quotations.
3. Name of the Web site, in italics.
4. The year the image was published,
5. CC.
6. URL.

Resulting citation: Schrock, Kathy. “Butterfly.” Flickr. 2011, CC. flickr.com/kathyschrock/345.html.

Use the worksheet with students to practice writing citations for an online Creative Commons-licensed image.

All of the images on the worksheet came from https://www.loc.gov/.

Activity: Sentence Review

If your students need to brush up on simple, compound, and complex sentences, check out this free activity by Love Learning.