Author: Jose Aguilar

The lesson I’ve created is made to be an opener to a unit on geography. The activity is meant to be for the 9th graders that I’m working with at my school, however it could be a good opener to a geography lesson for middle schoolers and lower grades in high school.

The essential questions I’d like us to discuss during the class period are: What story do maps tell and How do maps reflect history, politics, and economics?

During this lesson, students will be attempting to draw the a map of the world from their memory in pairs at the beginning of class. Following this activity, the students will compare their maps to a contemporary map of the world. In a large group discussion (the entire classroom), the students will question why certain parts of their map are less accurate than others, and why certain parts are very accurate. They will relate these observations to the essential questions. To finish the lesson, students will compare a map created by Ming China in the 14th century, and attempt to get an understanding of what story this map tells about Ming China.

For the specifics of the lesson, I plan to use the first 3 minutes to introduce the students to the lesson of the day with a focus question written on the smart-board : “What stories to maps tell us?”. Students will work together and think-pair-share the question to with the entire classroom. Following the intro, I will use 2 minutes to explain the largest part of the lesson, the “Draw the World” activity, where students will individually draw the world to the best of their ability on a plain white sheet of paper. I will do this activity too. I will give the class 7-9 minutes for this portion, where I will ask if anyone needs additional time at the 7 minute mark. After this portion, I will project a map of the world using the smartboard, and students will look at what parts they had that were accurate, what parts they had that weren’t accurate, and attempt to explain why their maps were drawn the way they were. I will go first, to model what I’m looking for, and explain how the deficiencies and accuracies of my map reflect my own individual history and life story. With the remaining time in class, we will switch over to a map of Ming China, and attempt to discover what story that map tells about China during the period in which the map was created. Both discussions will revolve around the essential questions for the class period.

Timeline:

00:00-03:00 – Focus Question

03:00-05:00 – Directions for the “Draw the World Activity

05:00-13:00 – “Draw the World” Activity

13:00-19:00 – Discussion and debrief of “Draw the World Activity”

19:00-22:00 – Map of Ming China Activity

This google forums mini lesson allows students to utilize a lot of historical thinking skills, including sourcing, contextualization, and close reading. An activity like this allows students to work with the primary source and make their own analysis of the document rather than reading sources secondhand from a textbook. It’s an extremely visual activity in comparison to reading, and the activity relates to key vocab found in most World War I units. Also, since I chose to not make the forum a quiz, students can collaborate and answer the open ended questions together. Additionally, I could see the forum formatting useful for a lot of different activities, with the most useful one being an exit slip for a formative assessment tool. I can very easily see myself using something like I created today in my classrooms in the future.

The meme I designed highlights a key transition point for me during my time as a student learning history. Up until 9th grade, I never cared much for history; I saw it mostly as basic memorization of facts from dry textbooks as opposed to a meaningful educational experience. However, my 9th grade teacher showed me history was much more than what I had thought, as she started using primary source documents as opposed to traditional textbooks. This made history become much more alive to me, as instead of reading someone’s analysis of the historical event, I was learning about the event from people actually involved from the time period. I thought of how myself or my friends could one day be important to historians; maybe they would stumble upon our homework or cell phones to analyze the era that we lived in. History instantly became much more relatable and therefore more important to me, which is something I keep in mind when I think of how I will design history lessons in the future for my students.

My teacher from 9th grade not only made history more relatable to me, but also more meaningful and relevant. I always wondered before my 9th grade why it was important to know about the past. Why did it matter what happened to people who lived hundreds of years ago? With the way I was taught history in the past, that seemed to be the only thing that the tests I took cared about. However, this teacher taught me history was much more than just memorization. She taught us it was like a treasure hunt. You could ask any question you wanted, and there were sources out there, just like the ones we read in class, that would help you answer that question. It almost made me feel a bit like a detective searching for the truth. However, the truth was never entirely clear, and everything I asked had some grey in the answer. But that’s when I recognized the types of skills I’d be using when doing history: analysis of bias (my own and others), evaluation of the importance of the sources I found (how much they helped or didn’t help me answer my question), organization of all the data I found, and formulating a clear presentation on my findings to the class. All these skills are extremely valuable/necessary to almost any type of work I could imagine, and ever since then, the importance of history has only became more apparent to me.