This past week at school we began our Olympic bid pitches. The students were able to present to the rest of the class their projects and explain why their country should be able to host The Olympics. I went into that day’s class wondering how the audience would behave and was surprised by the result. I imagined that students would get bored and begin talking so I created a worksheet for them to fill out highlighting positives, negatives, and questions about other presentations. The questions portions was probably the best idea out of the 3 because it provided the structure for a good back-and-forth discussing once the presentations were completed. Some of the students tried to stump/embarrass the opposing groups after their performance asking them difficult questions. It was impressive to see some of those questions being asked though because it showed that students did their homework on opposing countries too. The assignment was framed around the idea of why your country should host the Olympics and why it shouldn’t be in other countries. The presentations supported the why factor but the question asking highlighted the why not. I was generally surprised with the amount of work the students were able to complete after only doing research for 2-3 days. This was a lot smoother than our previous NHD projects and occurred in about 1/10 of the amount of time. Hopefully lessons continue to go this smoothly and I’m able to still create plans that will excite the students into doing good work.

This past week we had a whopping 2.5 days of school. I began the week introducing an Olympics Unit to the class by putting on a model Olympic Bid pitch. I was expecting the students to collaborate and conduct research together later in the week, but due to the snow that hasn’t been able to happen. One thing that I noticed a few weeks ago that I was able to re-implement this week was goal worksheets. When I have the students working in groups, I’ve noticed that some tend to slack off while others do the majority of the work. I brought back our NHD goal-setting worksheets with hopes that they would get the students to set their own goals and try to achieve them daily. From my monitoring of the classroom I was able to see that the students were, as expected, setting daily goals and reflecting on them at the end of each class. I was really impressed by this. Last time I noticed a few students filling in their reflection at the beginning of class because they forgot to the day before, but this time they looked like they were all doing what they were suppose to. I haven’t had the opportunity to collect and closely review all of the goal-worksheets yet because of the stupid snow, but I’m hoping from the improvements that I’ve already seen that these goal worksheets are going to be even more impressive than the last batch.

This week at school I’ve been really excited to teach one of my first completely constructed units. I’ve been watching my teacher teach for a bit and taking notes and I’ve noticed some of his most successful lessons occur when he’s able to relate real life current events with his plan for class. I thought it would be a great opportunity to start an Olympics lesson plan because this year’s Winter Olympics will be taking place as I’m teaching the lesson. We’ve only had one day of the lesson plan so far, but the students seemed really engaged throughout the whole lesson. Even some of the kids that don’t normally participate as much were raising their hands and sharing everything they knew about the Olympics in our preview.
My ultimate goal is to place the students in groups and have them create an Olympic bid pitch for their respective countries. I’m attempting to differentiate most of the lessons and teach toward specific learning modalities. The opening lesson gave students an intro to the Olympic Games and had them guess the location and year of when my favorite Olympic memories occurred. A lot of the students looked like they enjoyed this activity. I also gave out candy to those who guessed correctly so this created a playful competition among some friends in class. I’m really excited to teach the rest of this topic and I’m curious if the student enthusiasm will stay as high as it’s been for the rest of the lesson. I’m trying to see what type of lessons/units are more/less entertaining for this crowd so I think the feedback I receive from this lesson will help me out greatly in future development of my classroom.