Social Bookmarking and Lesson Plans

This week's project involves creating a lesson plan and making use of Delicious social bookmarking site and Google Calendars to organize and share plans and resources related to this lesson. My lesson plan is for 5th grade and covers social studies topics related to life in colonial America prior to the American Revolution. This lesson is structured around these GLCEs from 5th grade social studies: U2.2.2 Describe the life of enslaved Africans and free Africans in the American colonies; U2.3.1 Locate the New England, Middle, and Southern colonies on a map; U2.3.2 Describe the daily life of people in the New England, Middle, and Southern colonies; U2.2.3 Describe colonial life in America from the perspectives of at least three different groups of people (e.g., wealthy landowners, farmers, merchants, indentured servants, laborers and the poor, women, enslaved people, free Africans, and American Indians). It also covers these METs: Perform simple queries on existing databases and report results on an assigned topic, collaborate with classmates using a variety of technology tools to plan, organize, and create a group project, and use Web search engines and built-in search functions of other various resources to locate information

I chose this unit for a few reasons. I have a particular interest for this era of American history, I haven't done much work with social studies yet in my teacher education preparation so I thought I would do some exploring now, and I am interested in teaching 5th grade so I thought it would be beneficial to examine their GLCEs. I used the tag "Colonial America Unit" on Delicious to organize the links to resources I collected for this lesson.

I chose to begin my search for web resources about this topic of Colonial life at the website for Colonial Williamsburg. Here, I found a Kids Zone with online games, fun characters, and interactive descriptions of the types of people that lived in Williamsburg and a virtual tour of the town. I would use this site, either on a screen projector or for students to explore themselves in a computer lab on the first day of the lesson to provide an engaging and interactive overview of the topics to be discussed. This site does a good job of introducing different ways of life in colonial America including farming, slavery, the merchant class, and wealthy landowners.

The next site I plan to use is the history site from Colonial Williamsburg, which is not specifically targeted at kids, but it does provide more detailed information on the topics in this lesson and is not too difficult for 5th graders to understand, especially when the teacher is available to assist them. I would use this website on the second day of the lesson, when the focus is on more in depth information about groups of people, trades, and forms of labor. Students would be split into groups, given an overview of the structure of the website, and asked to look up a different topics such as African Americans, women, children, religion, family life, food, specific trades, holiday traditions, and rules of etiquette (these would be different for each group). The class could then come back together to report their findings and put together an understanding of how people lived and worked in this time period and how it compares to modern life.

The GLCEs also emphasized that students should be able to point out economic and social differences between the people living in the New England, Middle, and Southern colonies during this era. I had a more difficult time finding satisfactory websites to explain this idea, however I did come across a page from Encarta encyclopedia online that describes and organizes this topic very well. Students would be assigned to read about one of the three regions on their own, get together with the other students in the class that read about the same region to discuss and answer a list of questions and then report to the entire class their information. This activity could also help students learn to comprehend text from an encyclopedia, a resource they will likely continue to use in their schooling.

A site called The Abolition of the Slave Trade provides timelines, maps, pictures, and information about the slave trade's history in the U.S. up to the Civil War, its impact on Africa, resistance and abolitionism. This site could be used on the fourth day when the lesson includes a discussion of the Slave Trade and the role of slavery in the colonies. Students could explore this site on their own or in groups, or the teacher could present it on a projector to help students understand the horrors and enormous impact of the Slave Trade on history through images, statistics, and stories. This site does not provide complete information about this topic, so interactive activities, information from books and other resources collected by the teacher should also be used on this day. Google Earth would also be used here to show the route taken by slave traders and ships, from within West Africa to the coast, across the Atlantic, and into the U.S.

Here is the schedule for the lesson: