I can't believe it happened, but me and my groups first day of teaching to the 5th grade finally came!! We taught them about Christopher Columbus and his voyages to the Americas. Figuring out what to teach them and how to make it engaging was definitely very stressful but I was very happy with what we came up with!
The first day of teaching was our Direct Instruction lesson. We created an interactive and engaging powerpoint where we each took turns sharing important information about Christopher Columbus and his voyages. The class seemed very happy with our power point. Before explaining any facts, we passed out a "Columbus Notepad" where the students could jot down any important notes they see throughout the lesson. We constantly reminded them of key terms and had them write down facts that would be helpful for them in the future. They seemed to really like that and I saw every student writing down notes. Almost everyone participated and seemed very knowledgable about the information we were giving them. We incorporated checks for understanding where we asked different students review questions and they all did fabulous! At the end of our powerpoint, we showed them a video summarizing Christopher Columbus' voyages.
You can view this great video here! :
After viewing that video we introduced two guided practice activities. The first was a Columbus Web Organizer. We created one on a poster board and had the students raise their hands to tell us some important facts about Columbus and what they've learned throughout the lesson. Many students were eager to raise their hands and share great facts with us and the rest of their classmates. We also passed around a blank web for them to fill out so they were able to fill in what we were going over as a class. After we wrapped that up, we introduced a Columbian Exchange poster board. Students had to velcro different pictures correctly onto the board. Pictures included corn, pigs, horses, diseases, sugar cane and much more. We called students up one by one and they either placed the picture in America or Europe. They seemed to enjoy this and were eager to come up and place the pictures.
Here are pictures from our guided practice activities:
After the students participated in the guided practice activities, we handed out an exit ticket to test each student's knowledge independently. This exit ticket had multiple choice questions, a fill-in-the-blank quote, and a spot for them to share two things they learned and one thing they wish to become experts on. We could have saved a little more time for the independent practice but overall the lesson went great!! The students seemed very engaged and it set up the scene for our Inquiry and Cooperative Learning lessons!!
One thing me and my group was proud of was creating a set of rules to share with the students before our lesson began. We reiterated that it is important to follow rules and respect one another! Here is a look at our class rules poster board!
On Thursday we headed to school and were ready to teach our Inquiry and Cooperative Learning lesson. For our Inquiry, we started by briefly going over the scientific method since they needed to use it for this lesson. We strategically grouped the students into four different groups and created an interactive powerpoint for each group to access on our laptops. Each group was assigned a 'crew captain' which was me and the rest of my group members. We led them through the powerpoint and they had to work together to answer the given tasks so they can receive a clue to move onto the next task. They had to locate different coordinates, think about their key terms, write a letter to the King and Queen of Spain convincing them that Columbus deserves to take a fifth voyage, and complete a mini-game on the Columbian Exchange. Each group completed these tasks together and once they were finished, they had to reflect whether or not their hypothesis they made in the beginning on their explorer pages were correct. The students seemed to enjoy the tasks and really worked together to figure out the right answers. After they completed that, as their independent practice, they were given a letter from Columbus thanking them for convincing the King and Queen to fund his fifth voyage, but some of the words were missing from the letter. These words were key terms and the students had to independently fill those words out from memory.
After our Inquiry lesson we introduced our Cooperative Learning lesson. We had the students stay in their groups to create a poem about a given topic to participate in a class Poetry Slam. We introduced the rules, told them how to properly present and to cooperate with one another. We assigned each student in the group a different role like scribe, illustrator, presenter, summarizer and more. Since they didn't have much time left it was a little difficult for the students to quickly come up with a poem. With the limited time they had, each presentation of their poems were fabulous! It would have been better if we had more time but with what we had, I thought the groups did a great job!
Overall, I had a great experience teaching the 5th grade! Working as a group definitely helped me become more prepared. Our Inquiry and Cooperative Learning lessons were a little rough only because we had to squeeze so much content into less than an hour. If we had one extra day it would have gone so much better. Since our class watched our lesson, our professor decided to give the rest of the groups three days to teach rather than two. I wish we had that opportunity but overall I loved our lessons and we tried our hardest to make them engaging and interesting for the students. For our first time, I'm very proud of our group : One Happy Globe!
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