This mini-lesson has a target audience of 8th grade U.S. History students learning about the various settlements in early colonial America. The lesson comes after a previous virtual reality tour of Jamestown, as well as other lessons about Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. By studying Salem in this tour, students will gain a better understanding of life in a 17th century American settlement along with an introduction to the Salem Witch Trials topic.
The process for this mini-lesson will be a virtual reality tour of Salem, Massachusetts and the completion of a worksheet with questions drawn from information given in the tour. This was not my original plan for a mini-lesson, but it will be the activity I present to the Canby Education Foundation for the $10,000 grant my CT and I applied for. Feedback and practice of this lesson will be extremely helpful in perfecting how I approach the lesson in front of the CEF.
The main resources for this lesson are the worksheet I designed to help student analyze the information they gather throughout the tour, and more importantly the Google Expedition software and Google Virtual Reality headsets. These are not easily obtainable, but very valuable in assisting the learning of location-based Social Studies topics!