The Russia Unit has been completed!
At this point I'm really seeing that there is a difference between Geoglish and a normal Geography or history class. There were a lot of things that I would have liked to do involving communism or czarist Russia, but since the kids don't normally latch onto information that is high level, I cannot spend longer than 20 minutes on something that is not incredibly interesting to them. That's a bit tough to swallow because everything that I get blank stares from is typically stuff that I really like. For instance, I think that Stalin's paranoia is pretty fascinating. I tried to explain it the way I thought it sounded interesting, but the kids didn't get very excited until I actually discussed Stalin killing all of his friends. That being said, I did some reading type lessons during this unit and they actually did very well. I think they're growing onto my style a bit more and developing some great skills.
Heres a step by step of what happened and how I felt about it:
Day 1/2-
-Map coloring: went fine, but again 2 of the kids simply did not do their homework. I'm thinking harsher penalties need to be applied to the students that just blatantly refuse to follow through with their assignments.
-Climbing Mt. Elbrus: The kids loved this. Stolen straight from Dr. Hendricks, this really encouraged them to prioritize and get the main point of the day: Russia is cold and the main concern is always staying warm.
- Notes: The note guide I gave them worked just fine. They loved the video about Bear Grylls, but I did not know that it was 25 mins long. I really like the video itself and I think it helps them remember Siberia, but if I use this same video in the future then I'll probably edit it down to 15 mins (maybe cut out the dear carcass scene)
- Dice game: Went okay, but I need to find a way to make everyone participate all the time with these types of things.
Day 3-
- I got evaluated on this particular day, but I'll discuss that in the next post.
- The kids liked translating the alphabet, but the activity itself takes way too long for a hook, so when I redo it I will probably only give them 2 sentences in each language
- The presentation on the culture and leaders went just fine, their note taking is actually coming a long way with the exception of Logan, who continues to try and make the least amount of effort possible with anything he has to write down. He is a good kid, but I don't think school is really his top priority.
Day 4-
- The kids created their own communist society today, which actually went very well. Zach and Dylan were particularly creative, but some others were not. In the future I really need to emphasize in my directions that they need to show me that they understand the difference between a communist society and a democratic society, which I guess I did not do well enough given some of the responses I got.
- We ended the day taking a few notes and talking about the Cold War for the next day
Day 5-
- Butter Battle Book: Fabulous, they loved this. Definitely going to use it every time I open up a discussion about the Cold War
- Notes on the Cold War: These got a little bit boring, maybe I need to talk about the threat of atomic bombs a little bit more. I think the nature of the material makes it a little harder for kids to connect to. Perhaps including some more examples of hysteria in both the US and USSR would be more beneficial.
- Cubes: This process actually went well, but the kids were not incredibly creative with the pictures that they drew. Picture drawing is not turning out to be the magical awesome teacher tool that I thought it would be. So kids just genuinely don't like to draw, and those kids make up about half my class, so I don't want to become dependent upon it.
Letter to Bess: The kids read a primary source along with me one paragraph at a time. I had the students move to the back of the room and we analyzed it together bit by bit. I think next time I should pick either an easier piece or one that is not so long, because they were on board for about the first 15 minutes but then after that I really started to lose them.
*The ending test results were actually good, except for the map of Russia which I had to do some reteaching with. The average score was a 42/48 which is very high. I'm happy about this, but I think I need to make the tests more challenging next time. Making the matching section a little harder by having most of the words be related to one another instead of 20 terms that have nothing to do with each other seems like it would be a better way to measure if they actually learned the material. The map was a little bit different than the one they had before and that totally threw them off so I think I need to start saying things in 2 or 3 different ways per class period in order for the concept, not just the recall to stick.
*A few things need to be altered for the upcoming unit on the Middle East, but I think it will still be pretty boss.
