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.