Category: Student Posts

This lesson is one in a continued unit that focuses on the finding and use of literary devices in both texts and other forms of media such as videos, music, and etc. This is meant for an 8th grade humanities classroom. The students will have just finished watching the Lion King in class.

In this lesson, we will be studying and examining the meaning of symbolism and how it shows up and is found in text and different forms of media. In particular, we will be working with the animated film version of Lion King. When the students watched the film, they will have been observing and accumulated an awareness of different objects, events, or ideas that may have a deeper meaning/symbolism. Students will be introduced to a short clip expanding on what symbolism is. The students will then take this understanding and context from the film to point out an example of symbol from the film.

To start off the lesson, the students will be introduced out loud to a definition of symbolism. Their will be a time for any starting questions or such about symbolism. Next, the teacher will play a short video clip that expands on what symbolism is. After the video, the teacher will ask once again if student’s have any clarifying questions or concerns. From this point, the teacher will ask the students to get out their laptops and open up to create a new google slides/PowerPoint/Keynote. The students will then choose an object, idea, activity, or event from the film that they believe is a symbol and find pictures of the object, idea, activity, or event and put a picture on the slide. For the slide/picture, the student will write three sentences that describe how that idea, activity, or event is represented in the story. Once these initial 3 sentences are written, the student will go back and insert a word in which they believe summarizes the symbol of that object, idea, activity, or even. The student will test it by plugging that word into the same three sentences for the photo/slide that they created. If that word makes sense and fits in the sentences, then most likely they have discovered what that object, idea, activity, or event may represent in the film the Lion King. There is also a PowerPoint attached with these instructions and an example.

Resources

https://edmethods.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Methods-lesson-2.pdf

Have you ever heard of Visual Scribing?

If not, you’ve probably seen examples of Visual Scribing in presentations, apps, websites, or even restaurant menus . . . .

Scribing is a great way to capture large amounts of information and present it to your audience visually! Scribing helps us organize that information into cohesive groups – it’s a lot easier on the eyes and the brain, not to mention, pretty fun to look at too!

Let’s check out this video from a professional digital storyteller, Devon, to learn a little more about scribing and see it in action:

Colouring in Complexity (Devon Bunce Story) from Digital Storytellers on Vimeo.

Scribing as a Teaching Tool

Clearly, there are a lot of ways you could incorporate Scribing into your lessons, whether you want to spruce up your presentations, efficiently categorize large amounts of information, or offer students an alternative to traditional written outlines. Oh, and that brings us to our next topic . . . .

Scribing as a Learning Tool

Give students the opportunity to create their own Visual Scribes! Not only is scribing a fun activity that engages students creatively, it forces them to think critically about how they want to present their information, as well as how it all fits together. Let’s try our own Visual Scribing exercise by creating a graphic for some historical figures:

Requirements:

Pick one historical figure: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Joseph Brant, Betsy Ross, Sojourner Truth, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Hermann Melville, Susan B. Anthony, Mark Twain . . . .

• Make your character the focal point of the image. Give them a nice name tag, too.
• Include three quotes – give each quote a doodle or two to go along with it.
• Give your character a background/origin – we want to know where they came from!
• Include any fun facts you learned about them!
• Lastly, write your sources on the back side of the paper

In my lesson, I had 2 primary questions that I wanted us to discuss: What story do maps tell and How do maps reflect history, politics, and economics? While some aspects of my lesson worked better than expected, other portions of the instruction could have been better.

In terms of the positives regarding my teaching, I felt I did a good job with clear instructions and directions. This is something I struggle with quite a bit in my actual teaching placement. I tend to struggle to get the class under control while simultaneously giving proper guidance and directions to guide the lesson while working at my high school; being able to focus solely on giving directions rather than dividing my attention onto classroom management while teaching my peers made life a lot easier in this department.

The “draw the world activity” and the initial focus question activity were very effective at setting up the themes of the class and getting engagement from my students. The conversations they had and their contributions to the class were near perfect for me to segway into the next portion of my instruction, and while it is unlikely I would have gotten such constructive responses during the focus activity from my class at high school, the “draw the world” activity would have engaged everyone in the class and served as a perfect segway into the final stretch of the instruction.

My end activity, where we compared our maps to the map of China, could have gone better. However, aspects of this activity were still positive. There were clear connections between the ways in which the students created their maps to how the cartographers of china created theirs, and while I was able to bridge these connections at times, I could have done a much better job at relating the two activities. Some pre-thought guiding questions would have helped me substantially, as I was essentially scrambling while teaching at this part as I didn’t have the foresight to think to create these guiding questions for this portion. And finally, the weakest part was definitely the ending to my lesson. Essentially, I had no planned conclusive ending. I had a good idea in the activity that I created, as well as the flow of the lesson, but I had no ending activity that would have helped to sum up the activities of the day. Perhaps an exit slip or a google forum would have been a perfect ending, but I failed to include such an activity.

While I was satisfied with my workflow and delivery (other than the final activity), I feel my timing can still use a lot of work. The activities, especially at the end, felt a little rushed. I also felt the initial conversation could have benefited from using more time. While I have 91 minutes to work with at my high school, I need to be able to scale down and scale up the amount and duration of activities I plan so they properly fit within the time limits I am given.

From my experience, I learned that my timing still has quite a bit of work, and I need to experiment with effective ways to end my lessons. Many positive things I tried out also worked, such as my directions being written on the smartboard, using the document camera, and working alongside my students. I’m excited to put what I’ve learned into my next lesson plan, and I hope to learn just as much as I did this time.

In some aspects I feel like I completed parts of my goals in this lesson on consumerism in the 1920’s. Going into the lesson, I wanted the students to be able to recognize how the common features and such of advertising that we still see and notice today started in the 1920’s after the first war. I wanted students to recognize how specific elements that commercials had that allowed us to remember them, such as the targeted audience, aspect of focus, and the overall message, still carry over today. I especially wanted them to also notice how the advertising game changed with the inclusion of both TV and radio. I felt like the students in the lesson were able to see that as they were able to connect to commercials from their childhoods that appealed because of these same characteristics. 

         I also feel like the goals weren’t met at the same time because I wasn’t able to be as focused on the specific aspects of consumerism and the specific examples of the characteristics. I also needed to be more organized and give proper preparation time and instructions to be able to get to everything in the lesson and to fully touch the important parts. This is the aspects that didn’t go as well. 

         What I learned that I could do is to be more specific and detailed on what I want to touch in order to better get to the main takeaway and message that I want to convey based on my lesson title. So, in the case of consumerism, my commercial example and what I asked the students to produce didn’t touch directly on specifically consumerism in the 1920’s. As a result, I can pick two or three themes from the era that you wanted to teach about later, maybe the role of women, the culture of youth, how the automobile was transforming America, and show, use, and teach/explain using these examples. I can also have given students the task of bringing in their videos of their commercials so we can be able to get the most out of that aspect of the lesson and to be able to get to the rest of the lesson to ensure its best effect. 

         In terms of my timing, it was kind of off and on, with parts being more on track than other parts. I feel like during the intro discussion of their commercials and their experiences, I was able to foster good discussion and the flow and timing was on track. The timing got a little off when I asked them to send in their own videos to my email, when I wasn’t prepared to do it and it showed when I scrambled to get my email and organize the gathering, opening, and playing of the videos. I feel like the timing and flow and delivery was awkward during the sharing and discussion of the videos. The timing and flow returned during showing the video on the 1920’s and having the discussion afterwards. Overall, even with the timing off, the workflow seemed pretty decent as student’s were on track and we got to the next thing. It just wasn’t great because we didn’t get to the last aspect of the lesson plan.