After last weeks successful lesson, I once again found myself stumped with finding another creative activity that would keep the kids interested in the days lesson. Trying to link each lesson to the last has been a major challenge for the tech club. It has been very challenging to make the Tech Club a series of concurrent lessons, rather than having a completely different subject matter for each lesson. I was excited to make a complete lesson plan when we started the Tech Club, but looking back I think it would have been better to use different subjects each week.
The problem we have faced with a comprehensive program has been two fold. First is the time of day that the club takes place. The kids have already sat through a full day of school and their motivation and commitment to studying a comprehensive lesson is completely non existent; I completely sympathize with them on this issue. The second factor is the limited access to technology that could help motivate the students, they love working with the computers.
This week I hoped we could find a program that they could enjoy using. Since we had talked about all the states in the country, my partner and I decided to concentrate on the state we all call home. The school has access to the Montana Place names website so we had the kids look up a place they had never heard of in Montana. The kids could pull down a list of places in Montana and by clicking on the place name, the program placed a marker on a satellite map of the state. This showed the location of the place, and then they could click on the marker to get historical information on the place name they choose. We attached one of the lap tops to the projector and then each student came up and read about their choosen place name.
We added additional facts about the places and discussed how many towns were established based on the railroad and trade routes. There were many questions and comments from the kids, which I found encouraging. Hopefully some of the kids will go home and ask their parents if they can visit some of the places we talked about.
I felt good about the lesson based on it's objectives and the participation we got from the class as a whole. I think their commitment to the days activity came from experiencing a new computer program as well as the interesting things we learned about small towns such as Zurich, Belt, Swan Lake and many other places throughout the state of Montana.
No comments:
Post a Comment