Recently, my class and I kicked off into a new writing unit in ELA (English Language Arts), picture books! For the next few weeks, we were going to be drafting picture books that we would later on read to young kids at an elementary school. However, before we started drafting, we had to research on our topic. My topic was dolphins, and I did much research on them, so here is a little overview on how my research experience went. Enjoy!
After I had seen the movie The Cove by Ric O’Barry, I thought I knew everything there was to know about dolphins being slaughtered and treated unfairly. However, after reading two articles, and beginning to follow a blog about the topic, I found out there was so much more to dolphin treatment than what I already knew. Both articles were quite short, but buried with information and one was bias, the other just there to get the information out to the audience, so I got to see points of view, making me feel different things. Articles that load you with information and make you think and feel a certain way, are a success, making my research on the topic of dolphins, and the way they’re being treated, a breeze.
The first article that I found, was an overview of dolphins, on the website wikipedia. It was great that I found this article, because it gave me just one little paragraph on every topic about dolphins. Topics like, behavior of dolphins, popular culture, and human threats. Topics like these will help a lot when I write my picture book because I can incorporate what I learned in the article, in my story and characters. I loved this article because it taught me so much about dolphins and it wasn’t bias, it was just there for people like me who want to know everything there is to know about dolphins and dolphin treatment.
My second article, was even shorter and much more bias than the first one. It only talked about the evil of slaughtering dolphins, and most obviously wanted us to help them free dolphins. Even though I am completely for saving dolphins it would have been nice to see a different perspective on the topic, so I could incorporate that in my article. In my picture book, I want to show both sides of the story on dolphin treatment and help my audience decide for themselves what they want to do about the issue. It’s going to be hard if neither one of the articles that I found would give the other side of the story! The article was great, and gave me much information about people helping and what we can do to save dolphins today, but trying to make me feel a certain way kind of frustrated me.
My whole research process was fantastic. Even though sometimes, I got angered with the authors of the article, I still found out a lot and that is what counts. I can always do more research on the topic, but at least now my knowledge on what I will be writing about in my picture book has been expanded a tremendous amount.
No comments:
Post a Comment