Lesson 4

Lesson 4, first section
The object of the lesson is to help a third grader with a report about the solar system.  The student needs a lower lexile for independent reading.
I used the SIRS data base and typed "solar system" in the "advanced search." I set the lexile level for 400-500 and easy reading.  I found several articles.
The first article is entitled, "How Many Moons?" from the April 3, 2006 Scholastic News, Vol. 62, pp. 4+. 
The second article is entitled, "Mars Is More than Just a Candy Bar" from the Boys Quest, Aug. Sept. 1996, pp. 20-21.
The third article is entitled, "Super Science," by Geoff Alan from the U.S. Kids magazine, June 1999, pp. 16-17.T
The fourth article is entitled, "Saturn's Rings Around the Planet" from the Club 2! magazine, Sept. Oct. 1997, pp. 20-21. 
All of these articles are informational, and do not have difficult sentence structure or vocabulary words.

I checked the encyclopedia to see if I could find some pictures of the solar system for the student and found that by clicking on the search under encyclopedia and "solar system," that I could find pictures that the student could use for the report as well.  The article was found in Compton's by Brittanica, August 1, 2011.

Part 2 of Lesson 4
I had to find two ways to use SIRS Discoverer to find maps/images of volcanoes and list the number of results.
First of all, I typed in "volcano images" in the "keyword" search.  For all searches, 126 articles were listed.  Nineteen graphics were included in this listing which were very interesting.
I found 2 "web find" sites under volcano images.  One was a 3-d tour of the Solar System which gave information and pictures of volcanoes on different planets.  The other web find was "Mars Quest online."
Under "websites," I found 2 articles specifically written about volcanoes under "science."
I found 12 articles under "Exploring Nature.org" that gave information and graphics about volcanoes.

Part 3 of Lesson 4
This section involves the use of SIRS Researcher and a topic.  The topic is "suicide prevention."
The first thing I noticed about SIRS Researcher is that they have the latest topics under a long listing of various topics.  I looked up "suicide prevention" and found many articles.  Part of the lesson was to compare this data base to Google search on the same topic.  The SIRS Researcher is much better because the listing includes information from newspapers, magazines, and internet sources.  The information is much easier to access on the SIRS Researcher.  Another great addition to this SIRS Researcher site is that tools are provided for the student to organize notes and a list of other research tools to help the student organize the information they are reading.

The second part of this section on SIRS Researcher is to find information on "water use" to prepare for a town meeting discussing the necessity of water restrictions and why.  The Pro Con issues would be very helpful to read through and collect important information for the meeting.
One of the articles that would be helpful to read as background is the article about ways that different states are recycling water.  Perhaps this group of people could also be encouraged to think of ways that they could recycle water in their town so less fresh water would be needed.
It seems to me that during a time of drought citizens must be more conscientious about reusing the water that they have so they don't run out of drinking water. 

Water Can Be Reclaimed, Reused Instead of Wasted is a very good article to have available for people in drought areas to read and think about.