Christopher Columbus Lesson

Ok, so last Thursday my TP taught our first lesson. Things have been really hectic and complicated as far as scheduling goes, so what would normally be a 45-60 minute lesson had to be condensed into a less than 30 minute lesson, because the class was leaving on a field trip immediately after she taught. We did, however, on our last observation, discover the copy room, which has been majorly awesome-- there aren't even quotas, which is also really nice. We had like a million copies to make, and I really wasn't looking forward to giving Kinko's all my money. We had planned certain aspects of the unit together before Mary planned her lesson, and we both agreed that it is MUCH harder to design an interesting 3rd grade History lesson than it is to design one for science. Science is hands on by nature, so it was easy to incorporate activities into the lesson. History is much more fact-based, and you have to make sure you get the main points across through whatever lesson you choose to do. We decided to make the kids into "Explorer Detectives," and we gave them each explorer handbooks with a page dedicated to each explorer, and blanks to fill in for the important facts about each one. They seemed excited about it, but I think they might have been slightly disappointed that there wasn't much more to it than that. Mary also read them a poem that had a lot of good info in it and had them do a readers' theater activity where they pretended to be part of Christopher Columbus' expedition. They seemed to like it but were definitely not as excited as they were about our science lessons. We are also creating an explorer timeline that we add to with each lesson. Mary and the class put a Christopher COlumbus icon on the timeline and labelled the date "1492". As soon as the lesson was over the class got in line and hurried out the door to their field trip. It was pretty hectic.