Biography Lesson – I felt that I didn’t make the best use of the time to work on the biography lesson plan. It could be that my process of creating lesson plans is not the best process, but at this point I am not quick at producing them, and it is hard for me to work on them in a group setting if I don’t have something prepared in advance to bring to the table. I wish I had know that we were going to have this time in class, then I would have prepared a possible idea or questions to ask of a partner. It takes me a long time presently to prepare a lesson plan, but a lot of the time is spent just on “google,” teacher sites, social studies sites, reviewing the SOLs and Curriculum Framework, etc. looking for ideas that might work. This research piece of the process is hard for me to do in a paired or group setting. I personally felt a little at a loss of what to do with the time, since I wasn’t well prepared for it. That being said, I feel like I have enough ideas from the readings this week and some of the ideas within my foursome table to work with to create a lesson plan after further research.
Dust Bowl/Jigsaw Puzzle Lesson – I loved this part of our class. It gives me an idea of how I could do station-like/rotation work with students. I liked the template/graphic organizer we had to use as a visual as we completed the activity, and I think that this sort of lesson would provide students with all of the knowledge that they need for the SOL. I like how it appealed to lots of different styles of learners – with the use of the music, maps, correspondence, and an image. It was helpful to consider that there are many different types of primary and secondary document types to choose from. Also, the example questions handouts from the National Archives were nice resources to try out. This is definitely a lesson plan structure that I would use in my future classroom. My only question would be, when using this lesson plan, how would you manage students who really struggle in class? If you have any students with significant behavioral issues, would you make sure that they are not the only student in a particular group for the “expert” piece that will report back on that piece to their original group? Would you make sure that instead 2 members from that group participate?