Hello Fourth Grade!
I hope you saw last week’s lesson before the break. If not, here it is:
This week’s assignment is a little more challenging. Last time, I asked you to take some time to look around World Almanac for Kids.
This week you are going to use Britannica School and look up information about the Civil War. Britannica is an online encyclopedia. Like World Almanac, the encyclopedia is a reference source…something we use to get additional information about a subject. We usually use this in 3rd grade, but we had access problems last year.
Using this link: http://school.eb.com.
You will need a username and password the first time if you have not used this with your teachers, already from home:
Username: fredericksburga
Password: falcons
Click on Middle Level and type in “American Civil War”. You may have to click on link that says “American Civil War” This article about the Civil War is on a Middle School reading level. There is a lot of information there, so let’s move to Article Reading Level 1.
Click on the purple square that says 1. This article is for elementary school children. If you look around, there are lots of articles, and pictures. You can also find biographies on key people like Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, John Mosby, and more!
Go to the left of the page. There you will see “Web’s Best Sites” and it takes you to a web page outside of Britannica. It is called “NeoK12”. If you are loving what you are learning about the Civil War and want to know more, you can explore this site.
Have fun using the online encyclopedia. You can use this for other subjects as well. When most of your teachers were your age, more than likely our homes had a 22 volume set of encyclopedias, along with a dictionary, and thesaurus (also reference sources). Every library had different kinds of encyclopedias as well. The problem was they were big and bulky. The other problem was some of the information went out of date quickly. Because encyclopedias were expensive, it was hard to replace them every few years. Now that most reference books are online, the information is updated all of the time.