School's Out

Grade Level: 4^th - 5^th Grades

Content Area: Language Arts, Writing, Geography, Computer Literacy, Educational Technology

Time: 1.5 hrs

Student Instructions:

The goal of this lesson is for students to collaborate and discuss their family’s vacation interests, needs, and concerns and determine various factors that are taken into consideration when planning a vacation.   

Students will:

• Understand how to use technology to develop an online survey.
• Discover factors which affect vacation choices.
• Understand relationships between survey data.
• Learn how to interpret and summarize survey results.

You will act as market researchers and design an online travel survey using Survey Monkey or other online survey tool to collect information from your classmate’s family members.

The survey targets families who are looking for exciting discount summer vacations and will be online in order for all family members to participate.  You will present your findings in the form of a summary paper which will be presented to the class and teacher.

Day 1- Teacher will assign students in diverse group of 4-5 students. 

Your group will meet and discuss your family’s vacation needs, interests, and concerns in order to develop a list of questions for an online survey.  The goal of the survey is to determine the best summer vacation for your target family based on this information.  All groups in the class will come together and develop a common list of questions.

Some critical thinking ideas to be considered for group discussion are:

• Budget
• Activities
• Locations
• Safety

The group(s) will enter all questions and responses into an online survey tool such as SurveyMonkey and each student will ask their family members to complete the online survey that evening.

Day 2-  The groups will log on the the survey in order to analyze and discuss the survey results which are available online and determine the vacation needs and interests for their class’s families.   

Each student will create a one page summary paper using Microsoft Word in order to determine the type(s) of vacation destinations and activities that are suitable for their target families based on their understanding of the Travel survey data.   The travel destinations must include a geographic location, tours and activities that are suitable for adults, young children and teenagers and the destinations selected must be consistent with the average target family identified in the survey results.

Each student will complete the Collaborative Group Feedback Rubric to evaluate how their classmates contributed to the lesson.