The Watsons Do a Webquest

I was interested in finding a webquest for The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis, and, at first, it appeared that I'd stumbled on quite a few. Alas, it turned out that a majority of the duplicated essentially the same assignment: to keep a notebook just as Wilona Watson, the family's matriarch, does during their trip from Flint, Michigan, to Birmingham, Alabama. It is Mrs. Watson herself who proposes the assignment. She asks students to "capture not only the adventures that our family encountered on our drive south, but also the memorable events that happened in Birmingham." To assist the students in assembling the information, the assignment proposes different roles for the students, including: travel guide, newspaper reporter, historian, lawyer, and scrapbook artist. The assignment is broken down into assignments to be performed by, say, the travel guide or reporter or artist. Under each subheading, there are links to web sites that might be useful for the students to use. For instance, the scrapbook artist is asked to find fifteen representative images and to provide a 3-5 sentence caption for each image.

I really liked about this webquest that it would allow my students to learn a great deal about the Civil Rights era, a moment in American history that, in my experience. they find very compelling. This assignment may sacrifice depth in favor of breadth--the tasks don't demand the highest of the higher order thinking skills--but it does offer students a chance to acquire a great deal of information about a great topic and to do so in a student-centered format. In addition, the tasks allow for flexible grouping. It's possible to assign certain roles to certain students (based on learning modalities or interest), to use jigsaw, or even to have students work in pairs or individually. I'd want to prepare all of my students, before embarking on this assignment, with a series of mini-lessons about how to use information found on the internet without committing wholesale intellectual theft. (http://www.crews.org/curriculum/la/watsons.htm)