Subject: Geography
Grade Level: 3rd
Goals: Student will be able to identify the 7 continent. Student will be able to discuss the school and family life of people found on the continents. Student will be able to share their culture with others through a class website
Teaching Outline:
1: Discuss maps and continent
2: Discuss the life style, focus on school and family, of each continents
3: Discuss pen-pals and setting up a class website.
4: Prep for tomorrow, ideas, plans for class website
5: Field Trip/guest speaker about website.
6: Create Website
7: Connect with other School Websites, focus on finding international schools and/or foreign
schools (with English)
8: Set kids up with email-pals.
9: Continue to update website and contact by email
Management and Challenges:
It will be hard to keep everyone engaged in one big class project and if they’re not engaged the management problems increase. One way to deal with this is by breaking the website into chunks that the kids can work on in small groups of four or five people. For example, possible groupings are an introduction page, school life page, family life page, our favorite things page. By giving the groups individual pages to work they each have individual responsibilities within the larger single project of creating a website.
Benefits of the Technology:
I choose this project because it gave the students a way to connect with an abstract concept, continent and maps, with concepts that they are familiar with, school and their family. I also wanted it to be a genuine experience. We will study the different cultures in books but will use technology to widen our experience to people we can interact with (through the internet). By providing children with the opportunity to talk with children living in the culture they can gain a first hand perspective they couldn’t in books.
About Me
- Katie Marie
- a blog about starting our first community garden and embracing a simple life
3 comments:
What a fun idea! I love it! I am still not too web page savvy, but I think the students would love to be able to connect with penpals around the world. You said it very well...taking an abstract idea and making it concrete through relevant terms. How much time would you give for a project like this??
Katie,
You use the internet well here to connect not only with email pals but to collect information that you are learning about each other. Consider adding things like pictures and graphs and other means of showing similarities and differences on the site. It is great that you have that connection in Taiwan that you can use with your students!
This sounds like a great way to share about life in different cultures. I bet the students will have fun showing each other their web pages as well as looking through them. I like how you would break the website into smaller parts. This will keep them from being overwhelmed at the thought of creating a web page.
~Steph
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