Women Making History

    Another one of our assignments was to conduct a Current Events lesson and my group chose to base our lesson off of Women Making History. We assigned our classmates groups of four and each group was assigned to read an article from Newsela before class and to familiarize themselves with Tagul, which is a website where you can create a word cloud. In class, we reviewed some of the important women throughout history and explained what the 5 W's are (Who, What, Where, When, and Why). Once everyone was familiar with the concept, we ask the students to create a word cloud in their groups based off of the article that they read and they were required to include the 5 W's. Everyone was given a couple of minutes to create their word cloud and pick a shape that they thought summed up their article as well. We provided a picture of our own word cloud for the article that we read to share as an example:

After everyone finished, we asked the students to share what shape they picked and some of the words that they chose to include. The conclusion of the lesson consisted of the class participating in a Plickers questionnaire, which was a hit! Here is a picture of some Plickers cards in case you aren't familiar with the tool:

Here is the thinglink that we used to teach our lesson:

Overall, I think the lesson went really well because we were all very well prepared and enthusiastic about our lesson. The entire class seemed to be having fun throughout the entire lesson (including Dr. Smirnova)! It met all 5 of the powerful SS elements: active, integrative, challenging, value-based, and meaningful, which we have learned about throughout multiple course readings. This lesson incorporated multiple standards; one being that the students expressed the information in media forms. I also enjoyed my classmates' current event projects because everyone did something creative, such as including linoit, glogster, and kahoot.

If this lesson was taught in first grade, then I think the student would need more time and assistance and probably easier articles, unless I read the articles to them. If this was a sixth grade lesson, then I don't think anything would really need to be changed because nothing was too difficult about this lesson. I enjoyed using Newsels; I think that's it's a great tool! The articles are typically very brief, but packed with useful information, so students don't feel overwhelmed or bored with the article. One feature that I think is really cool and useful is that you can highlight parts of the article because that definitely came in handy when I had to read articles for the other groups' lessons. I also like that it was the little quizzes at the end, so you can see if your students actually read/understood the article.