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Project Plan Template

General Information:

• Teacher(s) name: Barbara Forester

   

• Contact info: forester_b@4j.lane.edu

   

• Title: People, Regions, and Cultures...Let's Go!

• Grade Level(s): Third grade

   

• Content Area: Social Studies

   

• Time line: 6 to 8 weeks

   

   

Standards (What do you want students to know and be able to do? What knowledge, skills, strategies do you expect students to gain?):

• Content Standards:

  1. Understand the spatial concepts of location, distance, direction, scale, movement, and region

  2. Use maps and other geographic tools and technologies to acquire, process, and report information from a spatial perspective

  3. Locate major physical and human (cultural) features of the Earth

  4. Understand how people and the environment are interrelated

   

• NETS*S Standards (21st C. Skills):

  1. Students demonstrate creative thinking, construct knowledge, and develop innovative products and processes using technology.

  2. Students use digital media and environments to communicate and work collaboratively, including at a distance, to support individual learning and contribute to the learning of others.

Overview (a short summary or project sketch including assignment or expected or possible products):

In third grade students study the five themes of geography in social studies; location, distance, direction, scale movement, and region. My idea is to have students use their knowledge of these five themes to generate, analyze, and create a project that explains the physical and human cultural features of their region to "give" to an ePal in another part of the world. Students will start by engaging and activating prior knowledge about their perceptions of another culture, and then connect with a student from another part of the world. They will then exchange emails with ePals and create several small culture/region projects where they will concretely describe details of their lives, and after correspondence with their epals, they will recognize similarities and differences. In turn, they will be able to describe and give examples of what it means to be from a different culture. In groups they will create a final digital presentation about themselves for their ePal reflecting on the differences and commonalities between their environments, their cultures and their lives. For example, students could create a region project on a podcast with pictures, music, and narration. We will then reflect and assess.

Essential Questions (What essential question or learning are you addressing? What would students care or want to know about the topic? What are some questions or activities you can use to get students thinking about the topic or to generate interest about the topic? What questions can you ask students to help them focus on important aspects of the topic?): 

Esstential question:

How does our environment and climate affect who we are?

Supporting questionss for getting started:

1. What are some preconceptions that with have about are eplas?

2. What are some preconceptions that they have about us?

3. What makes us who we are?

3. What types of questions might we ask are epals about their environment and culture?

Important questions for students to focus on:

1. How am I similar and different from my ePal?

2. How do the physical and climate differences in my region and the region of my ePal affect our lifes?

3. What affect does the culture in my ePal's region have on my ePal's life?

Assessment Plan (What will students do or produce to illustrate their learning? What can students do to generate new knowledge? How will you assess how students are progressing (formative assessment)? How will you assess what they produce or do?):

Resources (What do you need in order to carry out this project? Think: Human resources, material resources, technologiesHow does technology support students learning? What technology tools and resources—online student tools, research sites, student handouts, tools, tutorials, templates, assessment rubrics, etc—help elucidate or explain the content or allow students to interact with the content?):

Activities:

Google Earth

Regions

Community walk

Emails

Swap a day

Instructional Plan

• Preparation (What student needs, interests, and prior learning are a foundation for this lesson? How can you find out if students have this foundation? What difficulties might students have?)

   

• Management (How and where will your students work? Classroom, lab, groups, etc?):

• Instruction and Activities (What instructional practices will you use with this lesson? How will your learning environment support these activities? What is your role? What are the students' roles in the lesson? How can the technology support your teaching? What engaged and worthwhile learning activities and tasks will your students complete? How will they build knowledge and skills?):

• Differentiation (How will you differentiate content and process to accommodate various learning styles and abilities? How will you help students learn independently and with others? How will you provide extensions and opportunities for enrichment?  What assistive technologies will you need to provide?):

Closure and Reflection: (What lessons did you learn? What can you do better next time?  What went well and why?  What did not go well and why? How would you approach this project differently?  Ideas from the NCRTEC lesson plan:

• In what ways was this project effective?

• What evidence do you have for your conclusion?

• How would you change this project for teaching it again?

• What did you observe your students doing and learning?

• Did your students find the project meaningful and worth completing?