Who’s Who?–February 8th 2013
Objective: Given a Kids Discover magazine, whole-class discussion, and independent work, students will be able to identify various character traits and skills of different member on Lewis and Clark’s expedition by reading and sorting information using an organizer.
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To hook my students in, I found another video about Lewis and Clark. This video is about 6 minutes long, so I spread it out over a few days. For this lesson, I stopped it around 2:05. It’s a clay-mation video, and the students enjoyed watching it very much! Again, entertaining yet informative :]
Together, we read as a class a part of an article in the Kids Discover magazine dedicated to specific people on the expedition. We created an organizer in our journals to help keep track of information about Jefferson, Lewis, Clark, Sacagawea, York, and Seaman (hey, this dog was an important member, too :] ). I printed out sets of “portraits” so that students could glue the pictures in their journals for their organizer.
Later, students were numbered off to form groups. Within their groups, they were to take turns reading the rest of the article and filling out their ogranizer. I wanted to make sure my groups were split up/heterogeneous (students tend to cluster toward the same people if allowed to choose their own groups all the time). The groups ended up working very well, and it helped that I was rotating around the room constantly to make sure everyone was on track. My cooperating teacher also noticed how some groups started to fall into their own roles (i.e. student encouraging other members to speak up; taking turns; asking “Who’s next?”). For those who finished earlier than others, I had students pick out character traits that really stuck out to them about each member and had them write out sentences about that. When everyone was done with the organizer, the class reconvened and shared what they had. I used the SmartBoard to write in some ideas onto my organizer example from PowerPoint. I later realized the time we spent on this probably didn’t need to be as long as it was; everyone spent a lot of time looking at the traits and my cooperating teacher suggested the idea that a different kind of closure might have been more productive. I agree with this; closures seem to be the thing I really need to pay more focus toward as it is one of the more challenging aspects of a “lesson plan” for me. I want my students to have a good sense of “aha!” and/ or “I wonder…” about the topic. I hope to leave a more resonating impact after a lesson topic.
Here are some slides I used for this lesson (PowerPoint): Who’s Who?
Later Days and Peace to all ♥
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