Purpose
For my last project, I again chose to work with Dan. We learned from our mistakes from the last project and we knew we had to make this project focus a lot on the thinking skill. This time that skill was synthesis. To make this project very synthesis focused we decided to make sure our plans set us up for success. The research we had would be the foundation of both the english and social studies portions of our project. However, the two different subjects would not be 100% dependent of each other like in project three. With all of this in mind we decided to synthesize the research of our primary sources and then apply them to a unique subject that we both enjoyed, the National Parks.
Process
We started out by gathering many different primary sources that related to the national parks. We had writings and speeches from John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt, poems about different parks found on poets.com, and pictures on instagram taken by normal people i the parks. The goal of all of this was to synthesize the feeling of what a national park should be. We aimed to answer the question, why do these parks exist? We took this synthesis of our sources and wrote a sonnet for english and looked at the 10 most visited parks for social studies. Then after this we had our own experience in a county park near us and journaled about it for english and took pictures for social studies.
Product
Social StudiesHere we applied out synthesis by looking at the 10 most visited national parks. Specifically we examined at one feature of the park that embodied our synthesis better than any other part of the park. We gave solid reasoning to back up our synthesis. Then we took it one step further and went ourselves to find this feeling that we synthesized. We took pictures of ourselves in a county park and critically looked at the role that these parks fit into in the culmination of our synthesis.
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EnglishIn this part of the project we literally created our synthesis. We wrote a sonnet that took elements from our primary sources and combined them into a product. This also served to back up our reasoning in the social studies part of our project. The next step for us was to look at ourselves in the context of the parks around us. We went to a local county park and journaled about what we felt when we were exposed to nature. This worked to show a contrast between the sources we researched and our own experiences.
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