Capstone is a project where you decide on a topic, make a question out of it,  research it, and present your answer in front of an audience. The whole 5th grade throughout the district was assigned to make the presentation. Capstone became a 5th grade project in 2014 and has now became a school tradition. Capstone is very exciting because there are so many ways to go with the project

the process of coming up with a topic was very important to the rest of the project. Some of the documents that the class filled out such as the Curriculum wheel organizer helped because it gave us some research questions that we could use later on but also a topic for our project. There were many topics to choose from and I wanted to find something that i have an interest in and wanted to learn more about. I wanted my topic to be something that i am interested in but also something that I did not know much about. I chose Secret Service because I know i will be able to present it in a good way but also i will learn a lot about it. Also, coming up with the topic can be complicated because you would need to think about where you could go with the topic. This means that you would need a perspective on what part of the topic you would be doing. For example, If my topic were to be sports, would you do techniques or ways to play, etc

Coming up with the main inquiry question was challenging, For example, we had to make a level 4 question. A level 4 question is a question that has a purpose and is open ended. For example, How have Aquariums evolved their exhibits and how have they impacted the dolphins? This is a level 4 question because it is not open ended, has a purpose and includes key words such as evolved and impacted. These key words are important because they make the answer longer and make the answer include more information. My question is: How has the protection of the president evolved over the years. At first, it was hard to come up with a question because it couldn’t be too broad but it couldn’t be too small so it would only take a week to research it. Some of the challenges in making the main inquiry question were being too broad but being too weak of a question and also making it a level 4 question.

The process of creating sub-questions was easy because you could use the main inquiry question to help create the sub-questions. For example, my main inquiry question was how has the protection of the president evolved over the years? Then i was able to say as one : During the first few years of presidential protection, what protocols were in place. I used this question because it shows what it was like during the first few years of protection and it is a good starter sub-question because the questions are in a chronological order. Another question I used was: how does the protection of the president differ from in office to out of office. I used this question because it shows the differences from protection but also the changes they made to protect the former president out of office.

All in all, so far during capstone, there have been many ups and downs but I think researching will be a good process