Our school is going to become part of a 1001 Flat Tales project in February with some other schools. The students and I have been reviewing 1001 Arabian Nights through audio and reading selections in computer class. I will share some sample stories from previous years so the students know what to expect. One thing that will probably help the seventh and eighth graders is to start collecting ideas for their own stories in January. We just started a blog this week, so we have a great place to collect the ideas.

My own son is one of the seventh graders and I know he’ll struggle with what to write. By giving all the students time to brainstorm, the writing process might be a bit easier.

I never really considered a brainstorming component, but your post sparked the idea and I’m going to run with it.

Thanks for articulating the dilemma of the Librarian who has the knowledge and desire to help but so often is left out of the research loop until the end of the process.

I have a small but dedicated core group of teachers who understand and value how I can both assist the students and make the teacher’s life easier.

The closed we’ve come to the model you describe is a History Day activity that our middle school social studies teacher proposed. She hoped to have students in grades 6-12 chose a topic that could be tied into some facet of world history (theme of conflict and compromise), then host a culminating fair-type exposition one evening at the school. She got approval from administration but hasn’t been able to really get the project under way this school year. So far, I’ve set up a Google Document for us to share ideas and resources, and we both hope to get things up and running in the not so distant future

I had a BA in English, an MLS, and NYS teaching certification. I could help them so much if we only had some common planning time and less rigid scheduling.

Maybe next year.

diane

It never really occurred to me that maybe it’s not that easy after all. We do encourage them to start thinking about a topic well before we start the project (about a month before in most cases), but there’s always a few suffering from “I don’t know what to write about”

This is a wonderful post. Great fan myself of both Kulthau and Macrorie.

If you are looking for some “low hanging fruit” in regard to improving the motivational quality of research papers you are welcome to use this:

http://dougjohnson.squarespace.com/dougwri/designing-research-projects-students-and-teachers-love.html

This has been of interest to me for a long time.

BTW, you post would make a pretty good article for a professional publication. Not all of our colleagues are blog-readers unfortunately.

All the best,

Doug