It’s getting close to spring and a young person’s fancy turns to — No, not that, It’s college. Especially for my seniors who all have senioritis and want to just be done and move on.

Okay, I know some of you are still buried in snow, but for students, they have been preparing for college in one way or the other for years now it is SPRING.    They’ve taken tests, they have written letters and probably had some mock interviews, and some have even applied for student loans. But they have NOT nailed down the college of their choice.

Most of us chose a college using practical reasons—it was close to home, it was affordable.  But we can dream can’t we?  And students will never know that dream unless they have a chance to explore.  I even learned something!  One of my favoite authors (Dr. Seuss) attended Dartmouth College.  

One of the benefit of this assignment was that students learned that most college students are getting scholarships or loans. At one college, only 3% of the students were not on some sort of assistance. So they began to feel anything was possible.

Sign Up Sheet for College Project

I started with the sign up sheet. When I have assigned projects in the past, I let students make their own choices and when it was finished I had a lot of duplicates (they were actual copies. Some people are not so good at doing their own work, but they are great at replicating). So this time, I made a list of colleges and had students sign up for their college.  It was a large list, so no one had the same place—it made more interesting displays as well.

Research Project Instructions

Then I went over the instructions and gave students a picture of a previous college project. The instructions are included here.

Students were allowed 2 classes to research the college and 2 days to complete the poster. All but one students completed their research in two days.  Some even created titles, copied logos and pictures so they could print and cut out, just to make their poster more exciting. Putting the poster together took a little longer. I was out one of those days for training, so students just sat back and relaxed. When I returned, I had to give two more days, and two students turned in a week late.

My rubric was as follows:

Research 13 items at 5 points each  =  65 points

Creativity                                        = 10 points

On Task, On Time and Complete        = 25 points

        Total                                                     100 points

This was the beginning of the semester and I know students need to start off the semester strong so that 100 points gave them a great beginning. And we all learned a lot about colleges and tuition costs. This was an introduction to my unit on compound interest and the impact of student loans.

Samples of Projects