Take5

We are heading towards the end of the nice Thanksgiving weekend. I hope everyone enjoyed these last couple of days with their loved ones; friends and family. Oh how can I forget to mention black Friday, yup I hope you all got some good bargains if you woke up bright and early to start your X-mas shopping =) Well today I am going to blog about our fifth JA experience last Wednesday since the students were out yesterday Friday. Being the day before Thanksgiving there was a number of students absent. Overall the show had to go on, and the day went well after all. What I liked about this lesson is that it was conducted just like a history class and what I would imagine my classroom to be. The lesson started with a brief review of prior knowledge and the content we learned about last week transportation. Then we had a great conversation discussing the topic for the day/ communication. It was a topic everyone could relate to and we made sure they understood that because of the evolution of communication technology (newspapers,Postal service, telegraph -Morse code, etc) they were able to enjoy appliances such as cell phones, text messaging, Internet etc. This time Victor and I worked together, we took turns lecturing and explaining the activities. We used the student workbooks to read about the first four forms of communication. Focusing on the Morse code students learned how to read decode (vocab word) a message in a group. It was really fun to see them engaged working together. I liked that the activity enforced teamwork at in the end each group sent a representative up to the front of the class and one by one shared the message that their group had decoded. It was neat to put every ones work into one, it felt like a whole class effort rather then a competition =) We shared that next week would be the last session, all good things have to come to an end. But we told them that we would share of contact info with them next friday.