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.