Guiding a natural curiosity
Below you will find descriptions of a variety of lessons I have designed and implemented during my time student teaching. I have also attached relevant resources and fully written lesson plans in some of the blog posts. This page is always a work in progress, as I am always teaching new lessons and adding new ideas!
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In the midst of learning about the causes of the American Revolution, my fifth graders investigated multiple viewpoints from primary sources of the Boston Massacre. Lesson Objective: The students will compare and contrast eyewitness accounts, one from Captain Thomas Preston and one from a colonial journalist, to understand the different viewpoints of what happened at the Boston Massacre. To begin this lesson, the whole class discussed the following two images portraying the Boston Massacre: Throughout the discussion, many interesting thoughts were brought up. Some students noticed that the background was the same, so they speculated that the images were depicting the same event. Another student thought that perhaps they were different events, taking place in the same location at different points in time because one looked older. I facilitated the discussion by providing the students with background information on the artists of each painting (Paul Revere was a patriot, Henry Pelham was a colonial loyalist). With this information, the students began to notice how each side was depicted in each painting and began to speculate why that may be. Following this discussion, I read aloud pages 63-65 of Joy Hakim’s A US History: From Colonies to Country. This text provided the students with an unbiased overview of the confusion that took place at the Boston Massacre, giving them some of the known facts of what happened. The students were then given two eyewitness accounts of the Boston Massacre, one from Captain Thomas Preston who was there at the time of the event, and one from a colonial journalist who was not on scene. The texts were modified for readability; I chunked them into sections and included short summaries of each chunk so the students could access the text. It was the students task to read each perspective with a partner and then use a Venn diagram to compare and contrast the two accounts. We came back together whole class when the students were finished to discuss what we found and record our thoughts on a whole-class Venn diagram. We discussed the similarities and talked about how these facts related to the unbiased overview that I had read to them earlier. We also discussed possibilities about why each account was portrayed differently, based on the person who was writing the report. To assess each individual students' understanding of the multiple viewpoints, the students were asked to pretend that they are either a British soldier or a colonist living in Boston. Then, they wrote short, individual narratives describing the events that happened in the Boston Massacre from one of these points of view. Majority of the class wrote very descriptive narratives with details from one of the two perspectives, including the facts that were undoubtedly true (the similarities between the two accounts and the overview from Joy Hakim). The class had previously learned about the elements of a narrative and had the rubric for narrative writing in front of them while they wrote, as well as the Venn diagram and eyewitness accounts. I have attached the full lesson planner and all of the lesson's materials below. Some of the students' work samples are also featured below.
In this Everyday Math Curriculum lesson, the students were given a scenario where an explorer had to escape a room that was filling with water and closing in. They were given the following information: "Traps had been set to guard the treasure. Miriam fell through a trap door into a 9-foot-high rectangular room that measured 4 feet wide by 6 feet long. Suddenly, the room began to fill with water! It stopped when the water was 3 feet deep. Miriam sighed with relief, but her relief didn't last long. The two 4-foot-wide walls of the room began to move, making the room smaller and causing the water level to ruse. Every 10 minutes, the walls were 1 foot closer together." Their task was to first find the approximate height of the water after the first 10 minutes passed, showing their work, and then determine how much time would pass before the water lifts Miriam to the trap door. The students worked in pairs, using any strategy they could come up with to solve both tasks. The students had already learned how to solve for volume of rectangular prisms (area of the base times the height) in a previous lesson, so the only instruction given was an overview of what it was they were being asked to do, and what a good response should include (see chart below). After the students had time to problem solve, we came back as a whole class to discuss strategies. Many students were still unsure of how to come to the right answer. The students discussed as a whole class what they had done so far, and one student shared his idea of making a table to organize what they know about the problem, what changes each time, and what they need to find. Since no one had yet found an answer, we came back to this problem the next day. If the length change is constant (minus 1 foot each time), then shouldn't the height of the water change also be constant? This was a question that was brought up during the class discussion after some more time problem solving the second day. Most of the students had assumed that since the length changed by 1 foot each time, and the height of the water was 3 and 3/5ths feet after the first ten minutes, then the height should change constantly too (adding 3/5ths each time). This conjecture led the students to an answer, but the answer didn't logically make sense because Miriam would have been smashed by the walls by the time the water reached 9 feet. Knowing that this strategy did not produce an accurate answer, the students set off working in pairs again to problem solve. After more productive struggle with the problem, one group of students finally found their mistake. They realized that the height would not change at a constant, because the volume has to stay the same. This led them to finding the height by multiplying the width and the new length, and then dividing that by the volume each time, until they reached a height of nine feet at 40 minutes (see Shannon's and Chloe's work samples below). Another student used a different but still accurate strategy. Since she knew the height would have to be 9, and that the width is constant (4 ft.), she multiplied them together to get 36 and then continued multiplying that by the new length after each ten minute segment until she reached the given volume (see Meghan's work sample below). The students' struggled through this problem magnificently and used critical thinking and discussion to really form a conceptual understanding of volume.
For more information about the Everyday Math curriculum, visit http://everydaymath.uchicago.edu
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