ANCIENT ROME

Today March 7^th, is the day Kristine and I teach our unit plan.  Of coarse today would be the day that technology decides to not cooperate with us.  We got to Bishop Dunn nice and early eager to setup our presentation but our luck and none of the computers were connecting to the internet.  Needless to say that added to our stress and nerves since we hadn’t even begun yet.  Thankfully Mrs. Perk came to the rescue.  She was an amazing cooperative teacher and was always there to lend her assistance in any way possible.

            So now we finally have everything all setup and ready to go, we are about to take the students on an exciting adventure through Ancient Roman civilization.  We chose three important topics to teach to our students: Government, Architecture, and Culture.  Our unit plan began with a direct instruction lesson plan where we presented all of the key components and facts to the students.  We needed to give them a foundation for the activities that would be presented towards the end of the lesson.  The students were very engaged throughout the direct instruction portion of the lesson.  They were very inquisitive and paid close attention while we spoke.  There were of coarse of few times that we had to focus them back in.  During those times we used a focus phrase (Hocus Pocus Everybody Focus) to pull them back in. 

            After the direct instruction portion of the lesson plan we moved onto an inquiry based lesson.  Kristine and I created an interactive activity for the students to complete called Museum Madness.  The students were given a sheet with two columns on it.  The first column asked the students to record what image they saw at each station.  The second column asked students to record what or who the image actually was.  The activity was setup on IPADS with 10 stations around the classroom.  The students were really engaged during this part of the lesson plan and were so excited to go through each station.

            Our final part of the unit plan was cooperative learning.  During this section we broke the students up into groups and explained the expectations of the final activity.  Each group was given a picture and asked them to create a Thinglink.  Thinglink is a program that allows the student to add captions, text, details, pictures and information in the form of a collage.  The students were really excited to create theirs.  Our presentation wasn’t perfect and what could go wrong did go wrong, but all and all it went well.

Ancient Rome Powerpoint