Rationale

Fourth grade teachers let me know that their students were not going back into the text of reading passages to find evidence for their answers. We wanted to come up with a fun way to reinforce that practice.

Teachers gave me a passage from a released EOG called "Rocks from Outer Space" about meteorites. I thought of times in real life when you really need evidence: in detective work, in science, in a courtroom... Since the passage talked about meteorites striking the Earth, I decided that we should have a court case: Earth v. Rocks.

NC Standard: RI.4.1 Refer to details and examples when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.

Materials

• Globe and large rock for plaintiff and defendant
• Judge's robe (I used an old graduation gown) and gavel (anything you can bang to get attention)*
• Copies of the reading passage for each student (My version with just the passage; original version from DPI)
• Six copies of each of the questions on cardstock to reuse with each class.

Procedure

Teachers seated their classes in six groups. Without the judge's robe, I greeted each class and reviewed some expectations for courtroom behavior: stand up when the judge enters, address the judge as "Your Honor", etc. Then I said I would go get the judge, stepped into an adjoining room to put on my robe, and returned to the class. The teacher said, "All rise for the Honorable Judge Geo Logy."

After having the class sit, I introduced the case of Earth v. Rocks, explaining that rocks had been accused of attacking the earth. We were going to consider some questions that would help them focus their reading:

1. Are all rocks guilty of attacking the earth as meteorites?
2. How can you recognize a meteorite?
3. Are meteorites always harmful or can they be helpful?

Then the students were asked to review the "case notes" - read the passage and annotate it to make sure they could take in the information and refer to paragraphs later for evidence. When most students seemed to be done, I handed out one question at a time. I explained that students would need to decide on an answer as a team and present their evidence that it was the correct answer. For each question, I chose a different team to start, but other teams could add additional evidence.

As we continued, I suggested that they could also present evidence that proved that a particular answer was incorrect. I tried to make sure that I was giving all teams a chance to present evidence during the whole activity. As each team presented strong evidence for an answer I told them that they earned a point, but I never gave the total points at the end. I just wanted to have a way to recognize them for participating.

My working lesson plan and directions for the bailiff (teacher)

*I would have dressed it up more with a wig, but I couldn't find one.