Surveys make wonderful projects for a number of reasons:

• They are a way for your kids to meet and learn about the people in their community.
  
  
• They are great vehicles for inquiry-based learning projects because many of the questions kids care about most don't involve issues you can look up in an encyclopedia: They're about how people behave, especially their peers.
  
  
• Interpreting survey data is an element of media literacy that is often overlooked, and survey projects bring up many interesting questions about politics, social science, math, statistics and careers.
  
  
• With older kids, you can talk about the nature of surveys, like those we hear about every day in the news or in advertisements. What does it really mean when a TV commercial claims that "four out of five dentists surveyed" recommend a particular toothpaste, or when the evening news reports that one political candidate is three points ahead of another in one poll, but two points behind in a different poll?

Overview

In this project, kids do a quick survey on a topic of their choice, take photos to illustrate their findings and build a Web page with the results. Keep in mind that you can do a survey project just with pen and paper, or any other media, and skip things like the photos or Web page.

This example covers the entire process, using a survey about the shoes people are wearing as a demonstration project. We recommend that you choose an equally simple demonstration project first, working all the way through the project as a model. Then the kids can work in pairs on their own versions of the same preselected topic.

Keep the demonstration project simple, involving something you can easily photograph and limiting the kids to surveying people in the class or your building. Once all the kids have completed the entire project in the demonstration phase, do another survey project with the same steps, but let them pick their own inquiry-based topics, and give them more time to research and create their pages.

Recommended Time

If your kids are already familiar with digital photography, you can probably complete a simple, warm-up version of this project in one hour-long session or two 30-minute sessions. If you are still introducing the software, however, plan on working on the various elements of this project for 15 to 30 minutes a day over a week or more. A more extended version of the project with a broader survey base might take longer.

Goals

• To teach kids about surveys
• To help kids meet people in their community
• To introduce or practice photography, photo-editing or Web-authoring skills, as desired
• To help kids research an inquiry-based project.

Materials and Equipment

• Oversized pad of paper, 2' x 3' (preferable) or blackboard for mapping
• Computers
• Photo-editing software
• Web page-authoring software
• Digital cameras.

Before You Begin

Make sure that you are familiar with any elements you intend to include in this project, such as

• using mapping,
• digital photography,
• computer graphics and image editing, and
• creating a Web page.

You can use this project to introduce any or all of these topics, or you can introduce them beforehand and use this project to reinforce them. Leave yourself more time for modeling and exploration if your kids are younger or new to any of the software applications.

Step 1: Finding Ideas

To introduce the concept of surveys, do a mapping activity, starting with writing "survey" in the center. Follow the standard mapping process, asking questions like the following:

• What can we survey? (Almost anything can be surveyed: the music people like, the cars their parents drive, where they were born, etc.)
• What can we survey about these topics? (On the topic "where people were born," you could ask about the city, state, hospital or street.)
• How can we do the survey? (You could ask people questions, observe them or take pictures.)

If you're guiding kids to a specific topic area, be sure to adjust the questions accordingly. For example, if you are studying music, you might want to limit the project to something on that topic. Remember to model each stage of the mapping first, let the kids work on their own in pairs for a few minutes, then call them back to work on the next question. During the demonstration phase, use terms relating to your preselected topic to make sure that you have a subject that will match well with all the steps here.

We especially like this survey project as a way for kids to get to know their community. Try doing a survey about something common and having the kids talk to people throughout the building and their neighborhood. The photography element makes the survey process a more personal experience as well, whether the kids are taking pictures of their interviewees' shoes or their faces. If you do something like this, be sure to have the kids remember whom they interviewed, so that they can show them their work.

Step 2: Taking Photos

For the demonstration project, our example uses a survey of shoes in the classroom. Using the pair-share process, model taking a close-up photo of someone's shoe in which the shoe fills up the frame without any parts being cut off. Then have each child take a picture of someone else's shoe without duplicating any shoes that have already been photographed. Have each child always ask, "Has anyone taken a picture of your shoes yet?"

Step 3: Using PhotoShop

Again using the pair-share process, model the following:

• Bringing the pictures from the disk into the computer
• Opening the image in PhotoShop or another image-editing program
• Resizing the image to a 2-inch square
• Saving and naming the image as a JPEG or GIF file
• Printing the image.

Next, have all the kids do the same thing in pairs at the computers with their own photos.

Step 4: Classifying

Gather everyone around a table at which you are sitting, or have everyone sit around you on the floor. Point out that the class has not yet decided what it is going to survey about shoes. Take the printouts and begin sorting them into types, talking out loud the whole time.

Describe how you could sort them by factors like laces or no laces, sneakers or shoes, colors, and so forth. Have the kids suggest other ways you could organize them, then pick one method as a group. Divide the pages into appropriate piles, and count them. Our example sorts them by whether the shoes have one color or more than one color.

Step 5: Building a Web Page

Again using the pair-share process, demonstrate how to create a simple Web page for the shoe survey. You may want to cover other tools as well, but the basics are fine for this demonstration phase:

• Creating a new file
• Assigning a background
• Adding text
• Changing the font, size and color of text
• Placing the photos
• Creating links.

Your sample Web page should contain at least the following, but dress it up more if you like:

• Your name
• The class name
• The topic of the survey (e.g., "Shoes we wore on December 29, 2001")
• Two photos, one of each type of shoe you are surveying, along with the survey results (e.g., nine shoes with one color, 11 shoes with more than one color)
• (Optional) A link to a site where you can learn more about shoes, along with appropriate text to describe it (e.g., Solemates: The Century in Shoes)

Next, have the kids go back to the computers and work on their own Web pages.

Step 6: Creating the Kids' Own Surveys

Once the kids have worked through this project in its entirety, step through it all again and let the kids work in pairs to create their own surveys and accompanying Web page.