How can I help my child write impressive research reports?
To me, the hardest thing about research reports for elementary children is that most of the material that's out there is written for adults. Children don't understand, and they often resort to plagiarism; with the internet, they just copy and paste things wholesale off the internet. Elementary teachers can tell when a 2nd grader is writing like a professional, but it's not really the 2nd grader who did it. The first thing you want to do with a research report is try to find material that's up to the right level. Go to the library, go to the animal section or state section, and try to find a book for a child that's on the subject they're researching .When I do internet searches, I often write 'badgers for kids' or 'badgers, children', and that will help bring you up sites geared towards kids. That's one step is help them find material that's the right level for their research report. The second thing to do is to read the material together and talk about it. One of the steps that so many children and parents skip is exploration stage. Read the research information together and they can put it in their report. They may change a few words around. The way you want to approach this is to read the whole book about badgers, for example, then read a couple of internet articles about badgers, then talk about what the most interesting things are about badgers. Get your child talking with what they learnt and liked during their research. You want to try to push your child into writing that spoken word onto the page, so that their report is really theirs, is something that they really incorporated the information they've researched. The best way to impress a teacher is by showing them something that the child did.
