Unit: Lesson 3

The third lesson of this unit focused on the idea of "movement," encompassing the idea of movement of goods, people, ideas, and information on a local and global scale. We had some activities for this lesson that we hoped would be fun and engaging for the students, as well as emphasizing the key understandings essential to the unit.

As always, we started off reviewing key terms and ideas from last lesson. As Kelly led the review, I walked around and made sure that students were writing down accurate information on their graphic organizers. Ms. Haas informed us that she thought it would be helpful to make the note-taking more explicit, as students had not had much practice learning how to take notes and effective note-taking skills. We modeled this by writing on the board the exact terms and examples that students should be writing on their individual sheets. This proved to be much more effective than the first day, when we just had students write "what they learned" in general terms.

We started off by having students go around the room and find objects made in other countries. Most students were able to write down a list of at least 4-5 different objects with countries of different origin. We talked about how these items might have gotten from their home country to Charlottesville, mentioning different methods of transportation. After this, we introduced the term interdependence. On the pre-assessment, a lot of students confused this with the term "independence" and so we tried to be very clear and explicit in explaining that interdependence is when we rely on one another by sharing or exchanging goods, services, or ideas.

The main activity was the "country cards" where the class was divided into five groups, each of which represented a country. The groups were given a card with a list of their major exports and imports, and were told to find the corresponding country or countries who could supply them with the things they needed (imports). Surprisingly, students understood their task immediately, and were excited to go talk to other groups and find out who they could import from. Some groups struggled with appointing a group diplomat, but we had them vote and decide among themselves.

I felt this activity was really successful in showing the concept of interdependence in a very concrete way. Afterwards, we had the groups connected in a trade network using yarn, and they were able to see very visually how interconnected they were, even with countries that weren't direct trading partners. We also talked about different factors that may break or disturb trading networks, such as war, poverty, or economic shortages.

One thing to keep in mind is that we do tend to give all directions orally, so in the future, it would be helpful also to have written directions posted, so that students who didn't catch it the first time have something to refer to.

After this activity, we had a group discussion on other things that can move, such as people, ideas, information, diseases, and so on. Students had some very insightful responses and ideas to share, especially about their own personal experiences moving. We introduced the ideas of families moving, and asked students about their family traditions or culture that may have come from another country (different foods, holidays, etc.) The discussion went by rather quickly, and we found that we had 15 minutes of extra time before the end of class. Reflecting on this afterwards, I realize that we probably did a lot to rush the discussion, because we might have been afraid of the students getting bored or inattentive. However, this is an extremely bright group of students, and in the future, it wouldn't hurt to slow down discussion and have them dwell on a single idea or thought for a little longer. When Ms. Haas jumped in and started asking them to slow down and think about one idea, they were able to come up with much more reflective and thoughtful answers.

To close, we had students work on their graphic organizers by filling in "things that can travel" "how things travel" and defining "interdependence." This could also have been more clear if we had a sample on the ELMO of the titles/headings we wanted them to include, rather than stating everything orally and having to repeat it several times. From looking at their charts, however, most of them understood the main points and concepts we were trying to convey in the lesson. Finally, we had a 3-2-1 exit card where they listed 3 things that they use every day that aren't made in the US, 2 possible ways these things got here, and wrote 1 short paragraph describing their journey as if they were one of these objects. The last part we changed because we had a lot more time remaining than we had anticipated, and we thought a creative writing exercise would be able to take more time than a short "list 1 benefit of intedependence." However, our original prompt would have tapped into some of the deeper understandings and big ideas of the lesson.