Process
To begin, your teacher will assign you to a team of 3 students, which will be numbered 1-7. After your teacher tells you who is in your group, you will chose a role to play as follows:
Survey Maker (and Taskmaster)
Author
Graph Maker (and Editor)
The Survey Maker/Taskmaster
You will be in charge of designing the survey using suggestions from your team. After your data collection, you will need to take on the role of Taskmaster. The job of the Taskmaster is to keep your group on task, making sure everyone stays on topic and participates with all of the group's activities.
Author
You will be in charge of typing the letter to the librarian once your group agrees to the content.
Graph Maker/Editor
You will be in charge of making a graph showing the results of your data collection with the help of your team. You will also take on a part-time job as Editor. You will help proofread the final copy of the letter to the librarian and make sure it meets the requirements of the rubric.
Let's Get Started!
Your job for the next week will be to find out what kind of books your fellow classmates are reading. You will survey all of the 4th and 5th grade classes. You will be polling them on their favorite genre of books to read. After you survey the classes to see which genre is the favorite, you will begin making a bar graph showing the results of your survey. To learn more about the different genre of books, click here.
You will start by making your survey. Visit Survey Monkey and make an online survey to place on the server for students to take. I have created the username "mrssouthard" for both the username AND password. You will need to be sure to include enough information in your survey to gather adaquate data for your graph. Remember to save the link on the server in room 309 and in the folder titled "Survey." This is where you will instruct those classes to find the survey. Be sure to save the survey as your group number.
Once your survey is complete, you will log back into Surveymonkey and review the results on the website. You will turn in a copy of your survey to the teacher. Each group member should have a survey. You may print off one copy of your data to use while making your graph.
Your team will make a graph in Microsoft Excel. To see an example of a graph, you may click here. To make the graph, you can look over the graph making check sheet for help as well as use the Excel Help tab at the top of the spreadsheet. Once your graph is complete you will need to save it to the server in the folder titled "Battle of the Books" and print off a copy to turn into me. (Just a reminder, when you save it, save it as your group name or number.) Review your data on the graph and begin planning your letter to type to the librarian.
You can review some helpful rules for typing your letter. Your letter should be typed in Microsoft Word, 14 font, Arial. Please remember to use the writing process, and don't leave out that sloppy copy. Your letter should be persuasive and aimed at convincing the librarian to purchase the most popular genre of books being read by the upper grade classes. Remember, you are speaking for all of the classes who took the survey! It's up to you to take a stand and try to get more of the favorite books in our library. Once your final copy to the librarian is typed, you will save it to the server and print one copy that you will take to the librarian.