Research Project Template

Research projects are a great way to introduce little learners to the world of non-fiction. Throughout first and second grade we enjoy many non-fiction texts. By the end of first grade, I had my first graders doing a research project practically on their own (in a small group). Here are some tips and even a research project template you can use to display their gained knowledge.

I am going to preface all of this by saying…you absolutely need to do several of these as a whole group in order for students to understand the project. But the easy part is, there is SO many non-fiction books and articles available for the primary classroom now. And little ones are ALWAYS eager to learn about new things.

Let’s jump in…

Prepare Your Research…

First you need some quality and readable texts for your classroom. Scholastic News (a subscription), some articles on TpT, and many books through Scholastic make great resources for the research project. Readworks.org has some non-fiction content to sort through as well (which can also be read aloud to your students). You can also have your students use Kiddle. Kiddle is a kid-safe search engine powered by Google (read my post for more on Kiddle).

I always pick my students’ research articles and books at this point so they stay focused. I usually give them one book and one article to use to gather information.

Start your Research…

REMINDER: I have already done this once or twice with the students as a whole group, so they do have an idea how this works and what is expected.

Next, this part is fun! I break my students up into group of 4-6 (it’s up to you how many you’d like) and they pick their subject. I have a list of subjects they can choose from that I already have books/articles for. We have already had experience with “gallery walks” and thinking maps so we get in our groups and are given our first article/book. Students read them together (a strong reader usually reads it aloud or I assist). They choose important information (fun facts) about their subject and write it on a circle map.

Here’s an example of what it looked like when we were doing a St. Patrick’s Day writing and learning about Ireland. They read the text and would write down a fact they liked. I made sure they each wrote down a fact for their group.

This is from the blog post about first grade ELA standard finding evidence from pictures vs finding evidence from the text.

Then, once they have gathered information from each of the articles or books, we chose which information we’d like to write about on our OWN thinking map. Each student must pick 3 facts about their subject for their thinking map (with an intro and conclusion).

Research Project Template…

Lastly, onto the REAL fun. In the examples below, we focused on insects so we could draw a diagram for our own articles (because non-fiction text features must be included in our final project).

We compile our research to create articles (just like our Scholastic News has)! These make a great display for Open House (and the cutest tissue paper art bugs hung all around our room too).