How to be an Explorer of Your World: QUEST JOURNALS A Unit-Long Project for Fourth Grade Students Overview: This lesson

ties in to a full-year curriculum, entitled How to be an Explorer of Your World. This curriculum has students ask questions, investigate, and see the world around them in new ways. The first unit is centered on Exploring Your Community, the second unit is about Exploring Your Physical Environment, the third is Exploring the World. For this project, we will focus on how it ties into Unit 1: Exploring Your Community. Essential Questions: -What is a Community? -What questions do I have about our community? -Where can I go to get information to answer my questions? -How can I document my explorations and quest for information? Enduring Understandings: -All questions are valuable. -Asking questions is an important tool for learning. -Every new discover starts with a question. -Information can come from many different resources and can be documented in different ways. -Sometimes the journey is as important as the end result. -The people and visual world around us are valuable resources. Unit 1: EXPLORING YOUR COMMUNITY -Quest Journals: Journals with diverse prompts that will help students explore their worlds, engage in their communities, and collect information to answer their specific Community Question. Quest Journals are a Unit-long assignment, which will be used, in some way, every class. -License to Explore: A small paper License that represents each individual student. They will write descriptions of themselves as explorers and draw or collage to represent themselves visually on the back. Quest Packs: Small cloth string backpacks that students can use during their community explorations to store their tools and Journals. In class, each student will expressively paint on their Pack. They will then create a personal emblem to put on the outside. They might sew a patch, use puff paint, or make a stamp. -Community Member Interviews: Throughout the unit, we will invite members from the community to come in and tell us about who they are and what they do. These members would ideally be chosen in how they relate this group of students Community Questions. Students will come up with a question to ask the visitor. They will document

the visit and what they learned. A group of students will be assigned to photograph a staged portrait of that community member when they come in and to document the event in pictures. These pictures will go in students quest journals. Various projects might be done about the individual interview. QUEST JOURNALS: In this lesson, students will create books using the Stab-Binding bookmaking technique. Teachers will introduce the lesson by showing a clip from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and examples from the book How to be an Explorer of the World. As a class, we will come up with some definitions of the word Community and will talk about how we will be asking questions, exploring, and gathering information about our neighborhoods and communities. We will look at examples of artists, scientists, and thinkers who document their observations about the world around them. Three examples would be the journals and books of Frida Kahlo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Maira Kalman. Students will think of a question that they have about their community. They will decorate the front cover of their Quest Journal and write their question. The Quest Journals will be filled with prompts, like: -Collect objects on your way to and from school and keep them in your collection pocket. Make a drawing of these objects together on a page -Draw a map of pavement cracks in your neighborhood -Write down fifty things you notice about a walk around your neighborhood -Record everything that you consume or purchase in one day -Create a simple survey of five questions that relate to your Community Question and give it to a sampling of people. Show your results in a visual way (like a graph or pictogram) - Go to your favorite street. Draw or write about every detail that you see or think about it. -Sit in a public location and document people you see for one hour. Make detailed notes and sketches of one thing that stands out most about each person. -Document a place by interviewing people about it. These prompts will be used both during class time, alongside the other art projects, and outside of class. By the end of the unit, the journal will be filled with information written and visual, and will be a storage of thoughts, observations, and discoveries that the student had during the past few months.

Rationale for Fourth Grade: Emerging Expertise

Cognitively, this stage is a transitional one, as learners move towards an adult form of reasoning. Learners develop an understanding of abstract concepts, based on concrete examples, and they expand their attempts to define how individual reasoning fits into the agenda of peer groups and the school and community culture. There is a continuation of growth in the capacity to think logically, to be flexible in accepting various solutions to a problem, and to organize and apply thought to problem solving youngsters become aware of their own cognitive ability to process information and develop strategies that facilitate or impede performance. (Kerlavage) Teachers ask themselves what will children need to solve their problems? How can we set up a provocation or staged learning event that will inspire and challenge their abilities, but at the same time allow their imaginations free reign? (Swann, 2005)

During this developmental period, in which students are moving toward an adult form of reasoning, Quest Journals encourage students to make observations and collect data that illustrate big, important ideas. This will serve as a model for how they can organize information and think about the world around them as they begin to more deeply research and think about questions that they have. The journal will encourage flexible thinking and problem solving with logical deductions, solutions, and realizations. This activity will facilitate their capacity to grow in their cognitive abilities, while also pushing their creativity and thinking outside of the box.
When learners speak, write, or draw their ideas, they deepen their cognition. (Ritchhart, 2008) A repositioning of young children's art and visual culture as legitimate sites of cultural and knowledge production, in order to ameliorate a restrictive view of child art in which children's art is characterized as either pure expression or a movement through stages towards visual realism. (McClure, 2011)

This unit also asks students to represent themselves visually in a variety of ways. At this stage, when students become more anxious and self-conscious over their realistic drawing skills, they will be shown many different ways of succeeding in art classfrom sewing, painting, making maps and charts, even writing! Some assignments will include realistic drawing, to give students help with skills that they want to develop. However, assignments that do not address realistic drawing, are not simply free, expressive artworks that view the child of totem. Instead, they are important ways of documenting thought processes. In this unit, all forms of expression are important and useful. Through this, they will learn the importance of visually representing their thinking. Visual Examples License to Explore:

Quest Packs:

Quest Journal Prompts:

Resource List: Unit Resources:

Smith, K. (2008). How to Be an Explorer of the World. New York: Penguin Group. Foer, J.S. (2005) Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Rudin, S. (Producer), & Daldry, S. (Director), (2011). Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Motion Picture). USA: Warner Brothers. Quest Journal Artist Examples: Kalman, M. (2007). The Principles of Uncertainty. New York: The Penguin Press. Leonardo da Vinci Frida Kahlo Book-Binding How-To: -http://www.booklyn.org/education/stab.pdf Quest Pack How-To:

-http://www.chicaandjo.com/2009/04/27/make-a-drawstring-backpack/ -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFl9hUpR3hU
Rationale: Swann, A. (2005). The Role of Media and Emerging Representation in Early Childhood. Art Education. 58 (4), 41-47. Kerlavage, M.S. Understanding the Learner. Creating Meaning Through ArtTeacher as Choice Maker. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 23-72. Ritchhart, R. & Perkins, D. (2008) .Making Thinking Visible. Education Leadership. 68 (5). McClure, M. (2011). Child as Totem: Redressing the Myth of Inherent Creativity in Early Childhood. Studies in Art Education. 52 (2), 127-141. Additional Resources: Story of Stuff Project: http://www.storyofstuff.org/about/ Questions Kids Ask: http://www.questionschildrenask.com/