Juan Ponce de Leon Lesson

This was my first lesson to teach for our unit. I think I must have spent a completely inordinate amount of time on it, considering. I really wanted it to be fun and engaging for the kids. There was a decent amount of info on Ponce de Leon online, but not a ton of good lesson plan ideas that were doable in one day. I found a really good poem that shared some of the important facts about his life in a fun way, and I found a "scavenger hunt" activity that had to be seriously modified, so that by the tiem I was done with it, it was more of a matching activity, and it had completely different facts included (the original definitely didn't reinforce the lesson I was teaching). I guess I basically took the idea and made my own version of it. But by the time I finally finished with it, it must have been 3 in the morning.

We got to school and M and I made copies of all our materials. And then I got ready to teach. I was really nervous. I thought it would start to get better with time, but so far it definitely hasn't. I chose to make my lesson direct instruction. That format seemed to definitely fit the best considering the time frame we had and the fact that the students were totally unfamiliar with the content. So, I quickly reviewed the Christopher Columbus info (kids had gotten slightly confused about the fact that although he was Italian, he was funded by Spain, so I made sure to emphasize that). Then I introduced Juan Ponce de Leon. One of our students, who is part hispanic, was really excited about the meanings behind his name (Leon= lion) and Florida, and I was glad I included the information about "florida" meaning "full of flowers." It was cool to see her get so excited. I was also really glad for my years of studying spanish-- I never thought that would tie into an elementary social studies lesson :).

We traced Ponce de Leon's journey on the large classroom map, and then we read the poem as a class, taking turns, which seemed to work well. After that we put Ponce de Leon's icon on the timeline, and I handed out the matching activity-- they were supposed to match the events in Ponce de Leon's journey to the corresponding picture. The events were numbered, so they could glue them in order into their social studies notebooks. They weren't as into it as I had hoped they'd be, given the time I put into it, but I guess it is somewhat similar to many of the activities they do in class. I realized that there were a couple of items on the matching sheet that were slightly confusing. For example, one of the clues said that Ponce de Leon discovered silver, but I had a picture of gold coins, which I had forgotten to change from the activity I found online. It wasn't a disaster or anything, and I jsut explained to them what it was supposed to be, but it did help me to improve the activity for the next time I use it.

M noticed that during my lesson, the students were more focused on filling in the blanks in their explorer detective books than they were in what I was saying. She thought that having the books in front of them during the lesson was too much of a distraction for the kids, so for our next lesson, I think we are not going to hand out the detective books until after the instruction. We'll see if that works better.