General Information Objectives Equipment Time

  General Information

  Objectives

Students will be able to:

• calculate how much it costs for an "average family" to live for an amount of time.
• determine what an average family is.
• identify basic survival needs for a family.
• develop questioning skills related to researching (What do I want to know? Where can I find answers? How will I record and organize my findings? How will I present my findings to others?).
• research based on questions
• use sources such as: the Internet, contact Statistics Canada, visit stores for costs, etc. to find answers to questions.
• use STEM~Net/SchoolNet/Web66 to share with others across Canada and the world
• compare findings with other researchers using the Internet (and postal system if necessary).
• organize findings of participants in order to present to others what was discovered. (eg. Would it be more costly for an average family to live in Mount Pearl than in Miami? Why or why not?)
• present to others using multimedia format (eg. demonstrating findings on a computer screen using Power Point).

  Equipment

Newtown Elementary is expecting to be networked by the end of January 1996 and have these 16 computers hooked up to a modem. In the event that this does not happen as soon as expected we could use a stand alone computer with its own line to access the Internet. Heidi Gatherall, the learning resource teacher, will be able to work with the students on the computer(s) and library research components of the project while enrichment teacher, Wendy Batten, will lead in the research plan, research visits, phone calls, guest speakers, along with organization and presentation of findings.

  Time

We would like to further plan this project over the holidays and fine tune it in January. This project would begin in late January and run until Easter break. Enrichment students meet one day a week but for the whole day. The LRT may be able to take students out to use the computer on non-enrichment days. We would expect this project would run a total of 100 hours using Susie including teacher preparation time.