The North Carolina Travel Brochure Project

WHY A TRAVEL BROCHURE PROJECT?

In 4th quarter, I wanted to give my students a chance to “travel” our state and use technology to do it. I’d been trying to formulate a brochure-type project all year, so I finally just jumped in and launched a North Carolina Travel Brochure project.

This turned out to be a great end-of-year project. It was engaging enough that students asked daily whether we’d have time to work on it, and having something to keep building kept us mostly sane in the weeks after testing.

SETTING UP THE PROJECT IN GOOGLE SLIDES

Every student at our school has a Google account, so we’d been living in Google Drive all year. I built the project in Google Slides (think PowerPoint, but collaborative). I created a brochure template and shared it with students in “make a copy” format, so each student copied the template to their own Drive.

I also shared a long document of museums and educational sites across North Carolina through their Google accounts. Since our focus was U.S. history as it connects to North Carolina, I asked students to stick to history-based sites rather than science-based ones.

You’re welcome to make your own copies of these documents and edit them for your class. A heads-up: this list was built years ago, so some site links may have moved or closed. Treat it as a starting point, have students confirm each organization’s current website as part of their research (a small built-in research skill on its own).

WHAT STUDENTS RESEARCHED

This is where the project really paid off. Students dug into the Lost Colony of Roanoke, Colonial history, Civil War history, Native American history (mainly the Cherokee), and Pearl Harbor. They also explored the Elizabethan Gardens, a radio museum, the birthplace of Pepsi, Kitty Hawk (where the Wright brothers made their first successful flight), lighthouses, and a range of other places and topics.

Because North Carolina’s three regions are the Piedmont, the Mountains, and the Coastal Plain, and we live in the Piedmont, I started students with the Mountains and the Coastal Plain. Each student created a brochure for both of those regions. (We ran out of time before getting to the Piedmont.)

DOING THE PROJECT TWICE: THE REAL WIN

My favorite part of this project, and something I want to recreate in as many ways as I can, was that students cycled through the same basic process more than once.

The brochure project was big enough to require real research, time, and effort to produce a nice one (the Mountains brochure), but manageable enough that students could then complete a second brochure (the Coast). It’s rare that we take students through nearly the same process twice, and I think that’s a missed opportunity. Repeating the process let them:

1. Use the skills they’d just acquired the first time around
2. Start fresh on a similar project with a clean slate
3. Demonstrate greater independence
4. Push to go above and beyond their first attempt

I’m looking forward to finding more ways to build “an ethic of excellence and a culture of craftsmanship” through repeated activities like this one.

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THE CELEBRATION

I saved our Travel Brochure celebration for the Thursday of the last week of school, partly because students needed extra time to get their brochures print-ready. During the celebration, students were exposed to even more North Carolina places they could actually visit, and many of these sites are free or cheap. It was a great way to send students off for summer: with a list of state-history destinations to explore on their own.

A quick reflection on process: this project could have been done with pencil and paper, but doing it online made it far more engaging, the same excitement and motivation I saw with our Bill Peet picture book projects earlier in the year. I even printed the template for a handwritten draft first and decided that was a waste of time, I go back and forth on requiring handwritten drafts versus drafting straight on the computer, but that’s a post for another day.

Overall, our travel brochure project was a complete success.

Looking for one more way to fill those end-of-year days? Grab my free “This Year Is in the Bag” activity for the last day or week of school, an easy, low-prep way to close out the year.