Titanic Project
Assignment Due: December 13, 2006
November 27, 2006
Dear Parents and students,
We are beginning a unit on Titanic. We will be reading Titanic: Lost and Found and Finding the Titanic in class. To go along with our class assignments, your child needs to complete a project at home. We will be researching and writing reports here at school, as well as building powerpoint presentations to present the information they have learned. To accompany the report and powerpoint, the students are going to make a project of their choice at home. Some ideas they may choose are: building a model of the Titanic, building a diorama of the Titanic, creating a poster or game about the Titanic, or even making a video of the information they have researched. They may choose to do one of the above ideas, or they may do something else. The only requirement for the project they build is that it needs to have something to do with the Titanic. It does not have to be about the specific topic they will be researching at school. I encourage them to be as creative as they can when building the project. I encourage you to help your child, but it needs to be their own work.
The report your child will write at school, and if needed at home, will be on one of the following topics: the making of the ship, the passengers of the ship, the sinking of the ship, or the recovery of the shipwreck. The report will follow the outline of: Introduction paragraph, Body paragraph(s), and a Closing paragraph. The report needs to be written in your child’s own words. Again, we will be spending class time to research and write the report, but they must build their project at home.
Here are the steps we will follow to write the report.
1st Research the topic using the guidelines. As you research, keep notes on the important information you can use. You may print out the articles, then highlight the information instead of writing it down. All notes need to be kept and turned in with the final paper.
2nd Use your notes to write a rough draft. Organize the information you researched in an order that makes sense and write it in your own words. You need to have an introduction paragraph (tells me your topic). Then you need to have a body paragraph(s) to tell me all the details and information you learned about your topic. Finally, you need to have a closing paragraph to sum up everything. Your paragraphs should be setup so you have a topic sentence, followed by details. After editing and proofreading the rough draft, you will write the final draft. Be sure to turn in all drafts.
3rd Write a bibliography. This is just a list to show where you got your information. You should follow the following format.
Last name of author, First name of author. Title of book or resource. , City of publication: Publisher, Year of Publication.
For example:
Kuntz, Tom. The Titanic Disaster Hearings: The Official Transcripts of the 1912 Senate Investigations. New York: Pocket Books, 1998.
We will begin presenting our projects and powerpoints on December 13, so everything needs to be completed and here at school by that day. When your child does their presentation they will need to turn in all their notes and drafts of the report, including the final copy, which includes the bibliography.
Good luck and be creative for your project! If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact me.