I planned the lesson we gave to 4th and 5th period today, which started chapter 15. The section we focused on was about "Politics in the Gilded Age". We started by going over a few key vocabulary terms to place the activity we were going to do within its basic historical context. In this section of the textbook, the authors focused on the major issues of patronage (which led to corruption of the government) and economics (regulation of the railroads, tariffs, and depression) and what the presidents of this time period did to resolve them. So, to simplify the content, I decided to plan a lesson based on the "gallery walk" strategy.
Allow me to explain . . . The students received a chart with a column for all 6 presidents were going to learn about. There were 6 pieces of information for the students to fill in for each president. In pairs (and sometimes groups of 3), the students were assigned to research only one of the presidents. They could use their textbooks and a folder containing extra information that I provided. After doing their independent research each group made a poster that would educate their classmates about their president. These were then hung about the classroom and the students rotated amongst the posters in our homemade "gallery." During the rotations the students took notes based on their classmates' posters.
That is the essence of the gallery walk. The purpose of this activity was to look at the challenges facing the presidents, their achievements, and the ways in which they were effective and/or ineffective. Most of the time most of the students were doing their work, but sometimes it felt like I was herding a bunch of crazy sheep around the room. Hopefully the point of the lesson made it into the students' heads through all the talking and goofing off and being distracted and unfocused. Carrie and our teacher liked the lesson, and we think it is feasible to do it with 1st period next week, so I am going to be saying some mega prayers that it works out.
Today Carrie and I stayed at school until nearly 5pm planning our lesson for tomorrow. We are treating 1st period to a current events/global studies lesson about Haiti and we are also being observed for the first time by our UF supervisor. Send happy thoughts our way between 8:30 and 10:15 tomorrow morning!
Two anecdotes of the day:
1. One group drew an arrow on their poster, connecting two related points the wanted to make. One of the students thought it would be funny to dress up the arrow with the words "Live Nudes," which I didn't notice until another student pointed it out. Lovely, right? Needless to say, Carrie and I both spoke to him and he will not be pulling anymore shenanigans like that without getting a referral.
2. Another student tried to use his 504 plan to get extra time on an assignment. Generally, the purpose of the 504 plan is to adjust the curriculum as the students needs require. In this student's case, he can receive extra time to complete assignments. HOWEVER, he had at least thirty minutes to work on it in class after he took his test on Monday, but he didn't. When he got swamped with math homework, he didn't do his history homework, and thus tried to use his 504 as an excuse for not doing his assignment. We told him that if he had been using his time wisely during class, trying to get his work done, that we would have no problem giving him an extension. Given his deliberate choice to not do his work during class, Carrie and I, with the support of our teacher, will not be accepting this late assignment. Students think they are so clever.
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