The Research Paper Made Simple

Even young children can write simple research papers with an easy mentor text and model for writing.
Even our youngest students can write  simple research paper by using a fun and easy mentor text. The Important Book helps students write a simple research paper after doing some quick research.

When I help students write their first research paper, I love to use The Important Book  by Margaret Wise Brown. If you haven't seen this book, you really need to check it out! It has a simple way of telling about something that makes it easy for students to learn more about something and provides a great mentor text for helping students write in an easy way.
After reading the book aloud to them, I started out by modeling what I wanted them to research. I used a Tree Map to show them the information I found about horses. This also served as the information I wanted them to search for their research. I put a star next to the "important" fact and circled the other information I wanted to include.
Even our youngest students can write simple research paper by using a fun and easy mentor text. The Important Book helps students write a simple research paper after doing some quick research.

After I created my Tree Map, they chose their animals to research and researched to create their Tree Maps.

Even our youngest students can write simple research paper by using a fun and easy mentor text. The Important Book helps students write a simple research paper after doing some quick research.
They chose their important thing with a star and the others were circled.

Then I wrote my paragraph using the information and creating a model for them to use.
Even our youngest students can write simple research paper by using a fun and easy mentor text. The Important Book helps students write a simple research paper after doing some quick research.

They used my model to write a rough draft to edit and revise. Their final copy was complete with a picture at the top.
Even our youngest students can write simple research paper by using a fun and easy mentor text. The Important Book helps students write a simple research paper after doing some quick research.

Overall, these second graders learned a lot about some simple research to get them ready for third grade. They really enjoyed working on this and took great pride in it ~ something they all need!

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Even our youngest students can write simple research paper by using a fun and easy mentor text. The Important Book helps students write a simple research paper after doing some quick research.








3 comments

  1. We use The Important Book to launch our research unit in first grade. :)

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    1. Isn't it great! It is such a simple way to get students involved in research and writing.

      Andrea

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  2. Thanks for this post. I think it's very good to give students small researches. They are interested in something useful and you are glad to see them working. One of my students share with me this website http://writing2me.com/. He told me that he was very excited diong the research but the writing process is annoying and he ordered the paper there. But the research itself was made by him. Well, I understand this position. What do you think?

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