This lesson is designed for the beginning of the year in your classroom. You will cover lots of Grade Level Expectations, while creating classroom community through your cooperative learning.

Learners
This lesson is anchored in fourth grade social studies and involves communication arts, technology, research skills to a lesser extent. The lesson can easily be extended to additional grades and subjects. You can visit the Webquest Place, seen on the Credits page, get the original template used and modify this to meet your student's needs.

Before: Your students will need to have created a classroom constitution together, prior to beginning the webquest. The following conversations should take place, what is a constitution? (in general), what rights do we have?, what responsibilities do we have? why do we need rules?, what are good rules? why do we need a classroom constitution? Those questions will build the foundation for the students to understand what will be required of them.

Pre-Activity: After asking some good conversations about the questions above, you can create a classroom T-chart. On one side write "Rights" and on the other side write "Responsibilities." You want to have the kids tell you what is a right they have and then identify a responsibility that comes with that right. You want you students to make the connections and direct correlation between the two to lay the foundations to this WebQuest.

During: Tips for teachers as you go through the process
Step 1- You will need to be comfortable using inspiration to guide your students through their graphic organizer activity. Print out the government brainstorming guide ahead and the voting ballot for your class.

* If you have special education students with a learning disability or ELL students you can use the Constitution Guide graphic organizer instead of creating a web in Inspiration. This will allow students to focus on gathering the necessary information instead of struggling to organize and categorize the information first.

If you do not have a classroom blog to create a post for you students, you can use the following writing prompt:

After learning about the Bill of Rights, we know that it protects us. Pick one of the rights/freedoms that you read about adn give two reasons why we need to have it protected.

Step 2- Use your descretion on grouping your students based on their voting ballots. They need to be in groups of 3, with one member from each branch. Print out enough copies of the web style and question style research guides for the students to choose from. If you do not have a classroom blog than have your students respond to a writing prompt about their rights and freedoms, use your judgement on where your kids are at and what you have covered so far.

Step 3- If your class does not have access to the Brainpop video on, "How a Bill Becomes a Law" you can substitute in video your library may have on the process. After students have shared their expert knowledge of their branch and learned about the process of how a bill becomes a law, you are ready for some role-playing. You can complete the whole group activity where you break the class into Legislative (House and Senate), Judicial, and Executive. Now that they know what each branch does they will be able to try and turn a bill into a law. This will prep them for their individual bill writing activity.

Step 4- Allow the students to study and digest the picture before giving them answers. Let them come up with the answers. As you ask the questions make sure they understand the big picture, we need laws to protect our freedoms.

Step 5- Encourgare teamwork and use the cooperation scoring guides if you would like to get an additional grade to hold your students accountable.

Cooperative Learning Rubric

After: If some finish faster than others encourage your students to extend their learning through the conlclusion activity. You may want to bring up the kids who are done and have a conversation, together, about the time period they will be reading about. The 2008-2009 Mark Twain Award winning book, "Counting on Grace" would be a good read aloud that brings up the issue of child labor.

Standards:

Missouri Social Studies Standards Addressed:

Constitutional Democracy
Why Missouri has a Constitution and why the state makes laws. 1.A
Bill of Rights 1.B
The purpose of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights 1.C

Government
How decisions are made and enforced in the state government 3.B
Identify and explain the three Branches of the state government 3.C

Relationships and Culture
How groups and organizations meet the needs of people 6.B
Methods of conflict resolution 6.C

Missouri Communication Arts Standards Addressed:

Reading Skills
Making relevant connections from text-to-self and text-to-world R14a,b,c
Problem and Solution R2C4a
Judgements and Decisions R14b,c

This particular project, not only covers Missouri standards, it also provide students with the opportunity to use a variety of thinking skills. Students creat graphic organizers, choose a topic to become an expert on, choose a medium to present their product in. Cooperation and teamwork is required because of the group jigsawing. A teammate interdependence is imbedded in the process. Visual literacy is a means of stimulating conversation that requires students to think about how something effects them personally.