I just finished reading this post on the Middle School Matrix Blog by Hadley Ferguson. She has put together a quite diverse teaching assignment on the Black Death that happened in Europe. Not only did she ask her students to do a review in the textbook of the subject, but she also incorporated a group learning assignment, and individual fictional writing assignment and a creative art assignment made out of a wood block.
What seemed like a simple art project with a couple crayons and a block of wood evolved into a more meaningful project for her and her students after collaborating with the art teacher. Ferguson admitted she learned a lot from the art teacher in a couple minutes. She wondered how much else she could learn and increase the value of her lessons if she spoke with other teachers in other disciplines more frequently. Her post was very sincere and I felt like I really benefited from some good advice after reading her blog.
Teaching Current Events
Once again, Hadley has made another creative assignment. This time it was for current events. She used her smart board to illuminate her tweet deck and hash tagged Egypt, Libya, and revolution. The students were already curious as to what was going on in the Middle East, but they did not understand. After they watched the tweet deck explode with so many tweets they could not even read them fast enough, they had a class discussion. Hadley then assigned each of them to investigate the topic on their own. They were to look up what interested them the most on CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera and then comment on Edmodo.
The children were very energized by the freedom they were given with the study and the diverse way they were able to investigate the topic. They were showing more creativity and interest than Hadley ever expected. I can't help but to feel like I need to be writing all of these lesson plans down for my future students. This post has energized me as well.
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