Researching and Note-Taking: Building Expertise about a Colonial Trade

Building on the previous activity in this unit on colonial trade, the ninth activity has young experts continuing their research and writing summaries of the information they find. To begin, children participate in guided practice where they read and summarize an informational text as a whole class, learning to focus on the question words who, what, where, when, and why. Learners then break into expert groups to reread their informational texts while continuing to take notes and discuss their findings. The activity concludes with the young researchers writing a summary of their colonial trade, citing specific evidence from their reading. It is an excellent resource that supports using research to summarize informational text.