Current Events

Our Time to Present!

Over the last couple weeks, each group would present a short lesson on current events. This week it was finally my groups turn. My group chose the article, "In dispute over coal mine project, two ways of life hang in the balance" by William Yardley. My group got our article from a website called Newsela.com. This website was new to me and was pretty neat. I think this is a good website to use in a classroom. It is kid friendly as well. One thing I really enjoyed about this website was that after you read the article there was a short quiz you could take about it.

Once my group figured out what article to use, we had to decide how we would be teaching it. While talking to Melissa, she had the idea of doing a Pro vs. Con poster using Glogster. I thought this was a great idea because you can have mix feelings about this topic. The pros were arguing that they should use mine for coal and the cons were arguing the opposite. Once my group created the PowerPoint presentation, we decided to email the article in advance to our class and have them answer a few questions along with it. At first, we were going to have the students pick what side they stand for. But, I decided to go against that because people would pick groups with their friends in it and also some groups would be stuck with people who didn't know how to work Glogster. Now it was to present to the class. We started off by introducing ourselves and article. Once we finished that section, one of my group members went over what a pro and con was. We also discussed political posters. Once that was over the groups split up as well as the teachers and started creating the political posters. At the end of the 20 minutes, we shared each groups posters and they were pretty unique. 

  Overall, i think that the current events project was a unique activity to do in class. However, I would make minor changes. Some of these changes consist of more time being allowed while teaching it. Each group was given 10 minutes to teach their current events and it wasn't enough time. Next time I would give up to 30 minutes. I would also assign this as a solo project. From previous experience, it is very hard to meet up with my group. Also, my group chose a topic based off of Native Americans because that was their fieldwork topic.I was the only one left out and students wouldn't have this problem if they did the currents event project alone.

Here is the link to my groups current events project.