For each region, students are expected to know about the geography, history, culture, landmarks, and economy. (For this particular activity, we studied the history of the region separately.) After studying the southeast region for a while, I decided it was time to create our project. I first broke students up into six groups of four. In those groups, each student was assigned a particular feature (geography, landmarks, culture, and products & natural resources). Then using the Jigsaw method I had all the ones (geography feature) from each group get together, all the twos (landmarks) get together, and so on with the threes (culture) and fours (products & natural resources). Together in their new homogeneous groups they read about their particular feature. (I used Jill Russ’s nonfiction articles found here on TpT.)

After reading about their particular features together, I then gave students a copy of a Bloom’s Taxonomy paper I found on the web (source here) with sentence stems. I explained to them that teachers have to ask different types of questions in the classroom in order to get students to think deeper. Then I explained the chart, how to use the sentence stems, and modeled creating an example question from each level. (My example was using our science topics of force and motion and not social studies). The students worked together in their groups creating one question from each Bloom’s Taxonomy level about their feature. For example, for the knowledge level a student may ask, “What famous mountains are found in the Southeast Region?” Not only did they have to create a set of questions together for the Jeopardy review but they also had to provide answers too! As I circulated to assist, I found that often students struggled with those higher level questions, but this struggle also encouraged a lot of discussion and deeper thinking!