The first day of the Middle East lesson I was feeling a little under the weather, but this was actually not a huge problem since the students always spend the first day of a lesson filling out a map of the countries that we are going to be studying. I showed them a video from bizarre foods where the star was eating camel sausage and a few other things from the area. The connection I made was that they eat different things because they have different resources than we do. (farm-cows-burgers vs. desert-camels- camel sausage.) I played them some Arabic hip hop while they filled out their maps and gave them naan to eat while doing it. They loved the food and were semi interested in the music. Overall the day went well and the kids actually all finished their maps and most of them got full credit which is not something that has happened before. I will always give at least 40 mins to complete the maps because when they do them as homework they simply look like garbage.
Day 2 was fine as well, I began with a dice game that the kids asked for. I was actually really excited about this because it was the first time a student actually asked me to make something from a previous unit that they really liked and found helpful. Awesome moment for the day. The map quiz went overwhelmingly well, so for their actual test I will probably make the map portion fill in the blank. We had a short class today of only 55 mins so we only had time to finish the note guide after the map quiz and review were done. The class did drag a little bit, but I got some good practice lecturing and making connections to things that they already knew about like Neyland Stadium, etc.
Day 3- whew! this class was 2 hours long and we were in a conference room that did not have technology. However, I did the two activities from the day before (Crossing the Sahara, and the postcards) which both went very very well. I need to get better about making connections to the standards and objectives while doing activities/giving directions but other than that these went well.
-I gave the kids a stretch then we switched over to religions. I asked the kids to tell me a little bit about what they knew and gave them passages from each Holy Book. They only had to read one of the sheets and analyze them, and I really wish I had longer to do this because it helped identify words that they did not know, concepts that they did not understand, etc but since it was a type of jigsaw the kids were completely uninterested when I was not talking about their part. Note- this class cannot handle that on a bigger scale than the 15 min activity we did today..
- I gave them the creative artifact activity and assigned 3/4 people to each one that way all of them would not choose the ten commandments. I think that 5 of these will turn out really well and 3 of them will probably be worthless. I have trouble connecting to Coty and Jeromy since they typically take a long time to respond to things and I want to keep the class moving. However, this is rally not fair to them. I need to question them more and get them speaking out loud in class more often. When I have lower level questions I will try to remember to do this more in order to build their confidence.
*I did not get to do the puzzle activity, but this will have to wait for some other class, I know I'll be able to use it somewhere.
*Interesting note- When Zach drew someone that he "accidentally" made look like Hitler today he mentioned it and laughed a little then Dylan responded with "Oh it is because you're doing the Jewish one" I said "Dylan thats very inappropriate" and then about 5 minutes later talked to him about the work that he was doing so that we would still be on the same page. I still don't know if this was the exact right response, and since these kids VERY rarely give me anything to get upset at I do not have much practice handling these situations.
Tomorrow are notes on religion and OPEC. Pumped!
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