Monroe Middle School_Big 6+ ELA Projects: 8th Grade GLE (Human Rights)

This is a collaborative lesson taught by both the classroom teacher and the school librarian. Get in contact with your school librarian early to discuss scheduling and teaching responsibilities.

This lesson plan is a guideline. If you need to make minor adjustments or changes to best suit the needs of your students or the resources in your building, please do so. If you have questions about the curricular requirements, please contact Shelley Erickson or Julie Schik.

At the completion of this lesson, you will need to send two student examples each of a level 2, 3, and 4 project to your curriculum specialist or department head who will in turn submit them to your supervisor.  This can be electronically or as a hard copy.

Teacher—will assist students with selecting an historical human rights issue topic to research.

Teacher will introduce the requirements for the project.  (See Synthesis & Sharing)

Formative Assessment: Verify all information is recorded on student handouts (can be a visual check or graded assessment)

With direct instruction from the school librarian (with support from the classroom teacher) on search strategies and recommended resources, students will locate required information about their selected topic:

• At least 10 accurate facts about human rights issue
• 2 pictures
• How it is an example of a violation of human rights in history
• What can we do in the future to avoid a similar situation in the future?

Possible Sources of information:

• Gale Student Resources in Context
• Encyclopedia Britannica
• Human Rights Watch website

Formative Assessment:  Consistent and frequent verbal and visual checks with student to assess if they are able to access quality resources.

Teacher will guide students through transferring information into a notes organizer. (TBD by teacher and/or self-selected by students.).

With direct instruction and support from the school librarian, students will create citations for their sources.  Recommendation to use district subscription to Noodle Tools. 

Formative Assessment:  Visual checks for completion.  And/or, individual conferencing with students to determine if ready to move on to synthesis and sharing.

Teacher will review the requirements for the final project and assist students as necessary. 

Required:  Students will create an annotated bibliography and a visual product. (Product Info Sheets included)

Each annotation will include:

• statements about the relevance, accuracy, and quality of the source
• 4-7 sentence summary of the information found in the source

The visual product will include:

• 10 facts
• at least 2 pictures
• one paragraph explanation of how it is an example of a violation of human rights
• one+ paragraphs on how to avoid a similar situation in the future, based on examples from history

Formative Assessment: Rough draft feedback.

Summative Assessment: Use provided rubric to grade final product.

Teacher will guide students as they complete the self-evaluation form containing teacher selected items from the form included below.

The self-evaluation can be as brief (one question) or as long as the teacher deems necessary.  This can be a graded or non-graded activity.         

Noodletools provides a format for creating research papers.  It provides an area for notetaking, citation creation, and paper formation.

Guides for using Noodle Tools

This 20 minute video gives an overview on how to use NoodleTools.

This video shows how to create a new project.

This video shows how to check the format of your citation.

This video shows how to add a preformatted citation from a database or website.