Decades Project

              Throughout our education we are always doing some kind of research in order to better understand our world. Even in the younger grades, students are introduced and being prepared in the whole research process. The images that you see are of my classmates’ “Decades Project.” We had to choose a decade and do some research on it. We had to do the research, create a poster board, bring in some artifacts from that decade, and dress up according to our decade for the presentations. My group chose the 70’s as our decade. What we wanted to include in our poster board was our decision, as well as what we wanted to present. The freedom that we had to include what we wanted and how to do it was very rewarding. We had a lot of fun learning about our decade and dressing up. My group decided to dress up as the characters from “Schoolhouse Rock.” This was an educational cartoon that taught children about a topic through songs.  Since we were dressing up as cartoon characters, we had to create our own costumes. My costume was pretty easy because it just consisted of a blue shirt with a white star in the middle and red pants.

 This project allowed us, as future teachers, to think about the importance of having our students do these research projects. It made us think about what do we want our students to learn from these projects and whether or not they are effective. I think that a project like this can really benefit children. We would probably have to provide more guidelines as to what they are expected to include in their project, but at the same time we still have to allow them the freedom to do it their own way. A project like our “Decades Project” can allow children to really understand their topic because it makes it more real to them, rather than just a boring topic that they might be reading in a book.