Teacher Information

Design

This webquest is designed to be carried out by individual students or by small groups. Groups will need to be determined based on the explorer chosen, since one card will be produced for each voyage a particular explorer took. Students may want to work in pairs on a single card, although each should complete an explorer worksheet.

Choosing an Explorer

Although most explorer projects focus on the great age of exploration, encourage your students to think "outside the box" on this one. 

Making the Cards

The blank cards included in the Card Instructions and Samples page can be copied into any art program, such as Photoshop or Photo Draw. If you do not have an art program that will work, you can go to www.serif.com and download a free version of Photoplus 5. Microsoft Paint will also work, but be aware that Paint and Photoplus 5 are less intuitive for this kind of work than Photoshop or PhotoDraw.

If you want your students to hand-letter their cards, you may want to have them use 3x5 index cards - a very fine point pen will be helpful.

There is no real contest!

Hopefully, you and your class have realized that there is no company called TOP CARDS (there is one called Topps) and there is no contest. The idea of a contest is just to make the process more fun. A fun ending for this project is to reproduce everyone's cards and make them into a 'pack' for each kid to take home. That way, everyone ends up with a nice collection of explorer cards that they can learn from and trade with.

Credits

I Hope you had fun with this webquest, which was completed as part of a master's library science class. Special thanks to my 10 year old daughter, Amy, who created the sample cards and card blanks as part of a homeschool assignment. She enjoyed it, I hope your students did too.                                          - Cheryl Dobbs