Teacher's Lounge Back to topic index This Topic: Teaching strategies (T12) Comments may have been edited for clarity and brevity - Greek Week: an ah-ha moment click here - Music Lessons click here - Begin with a teaser click here Greek Week: an ah-ha moment 8/10/2011 Tim, new teacher, North Carolina I am extremely interested in some of the activities you wrote about in which "Ah ha!" moments took place for the students.  Is there any way you could explain to me more about your Greece Week project/lesson plans? 8/11/2011 Students Friend response The basis for the Greek Week activity was a packaged simulation (with some modifications) available from Social Studies School Service at: www.socialstudies.com/c/product.html?record@TF25376+s@mp6UnwPf80Mfg. There was more material here than I could use, so I chose some activities and left out others.  One day each was devoted to three major events: Olympic games, the debates, and the concluding Greek feast. High school students can be too cool for school, so there is a possibility some might scoff at the prospect of acting Greek for a week. (I conducted this activity mostly with 9th graders.) I gave each class the option of skipping Greek Week. But if we were to go ahead, each student would be reqired to participate. Students weren't about to pass up a week away from their normal studies, so peer pressure always brought up each student's hand. Underlying the week-long activity (90-minute blocks each day) was the competition between Greek city-states, or the polis.  In reality, of course, the ancient Greek city states were highly competitive. Our classroom competition was the key to demonstrating that citizens and leaders in a democracy may place their own self interest above the good of the larger society...and that ethics may be compromised in the process. This led to the "ah ha moment" you mentioned.   To this end, I created a score chart on a large sheet of paper and posted it at the front of the room.  City states gained points for numerous activities such as creating the best polis sign, or winning a debate, or winning a chiton fashion contest, or bringing the best food to the Greek feast, etc. In each case, the "best" was chosen by democratic vote of the entire class.  (Polis members were not allowed to vote for their own polis.) This is where the self-interest came in. To advance their own standing in the competition, polis members often voted for a lagging polis rather than a front runner that had actually posted a better performance.   Points were also awarded for victories in the Olympic games.  Where appropriate, 2nd and 3rd place finishers received lesser points than the winners. A polis could earn negative points by leaving a mess in their polis area or for inappropriate behavior. They could earn positive and negative points from the Fates as well, and for just about any excuse I could dream up. At the beginning of the simulation, I motivated students by telling them that the results would affect their grade.  Occasionally the competition got so fierce that I had to tone it down. At the end of the activity I awarded the members of each city-state a participation grade of 100 out of 100 and awarded additional bonus points for the polis that finished first, a lesser number of bonus points for the polis that came in second, and so on.  So Greek Week did affect everyone's grade, but only in a positive way. On the day following the end of Greek Week we discussed how self-interest affected the democratic votes of students, and I assigned an essay question:  "What did you learn from Greek Week about the workings of democracy?" During the week, students learned quite a lot about the culture of ancient Greece, the foundation of Western Civilization. They debated Greek issues, ate Greek food, wore Greek clothes, danced to Greek music, had fun, and experienced first-hand on a gut level what is perhaps the greatest challenge to effective democratic rule in any society. If my students didn't remember anything else about world history, they definitely remembered Greek Week. Music lessons 1/14/2011 Joel, first-year teacher, Iowa I am always looking for ways to help students remember history, and I found a fun video that may be of interest to you. We just covered the French Revolution: click here (She also has a fun Napoleon video) 1/29/2011 Students Friend response I just watched the French Revolution video, and it cracked me up.  Hard to compete with a teacher like that.  Also watched Napoleon and Henry VIII and Mansa Musa videos, but I think French Revolution was the best of the bunch. Thanks for turning me on to these cool videos. Think you might get around to producing a few of your own? 1/31/2011 Joel response You asked if I was going to make a song. I was thinking about it today, but I thought I would share a project I just had my World History classes do. Instead of me making the songs, I had them do it!! I think it turned out pretty dang good. I bought karaoke songs off of Itunes, and then the kids rewrote lyrics with topics and info from Student's Friend. After they rewrote songs, they sang and recorded their songs using a free audio editing program from the internet (Audacity). It acted as a good review and the kids thoroughly enjoyed the project, especially today when we listened to each others' songs. This project definitely needs some fine tuning, but overall I am very happy with the end results. Here is Joel's grading rubric for his "Song Lyric Project" MS Word file or pdf file And here is a sample of a student musical project; it's about British Admiral Horatio Nelson: click here. (Note: Each of five browsers dealt with this audio file differently. In Windows Explorer we saved it to the desktop and opened it in iTunes. Mac Safari took me to "Page not available," but clicking refresh opened the file in iTunes. Firefox and Opera asked me to choose an application (iTunes or QuickTime). Chrome dowloaded the file to a tab at the bottom of the page that I needed to click. Good luck. Begin with a teaser? 1/21/2003 Dan, veteran teacher, Arkansas One thing I like to do in the classroom is to begin class with a teaser of some kind. One I have used in the study of the Middle Ages is to refer William's conquest of England to the events of D-Day and ask the students to look up each event in the text and explain what is somewhat ironic about the two events. This leads to a discussion of what a Norman is, etc. I feel that you must attach any new information to something that is at least familiar to the student. In my experience, vocabulary plays the greatest role in the increase of knowledge. It seems to me that there are only two ways to have a thought. One either converts a mental picture into a word or converts a word into a mental picture. Try to have a thought about anything and see if it requires these two actions. If this is true, then the greater one's vocabulary the greater one's thought processes will be. So, by attaching new ideas to old knowledge (read mental pictures and already known facts) it becomes easier for the student to process the information. Back to my original idea, at this particular moment most of the students have seen Saving Private Ryan or some other movie surrounding WWII; so, I use that info to work into the fact that William launched his invasion from Normandy and the Allies returned to that site to invade Fortress Europe. Ironic? At least, maybe. I do not hold with the notion that content is less important than learning the how to's. Both are significant in the process. Ed Hirsch isn't totally right nor is he totally wrong! Cultural Illiteracy is a problem; but the inability to problem-solve is likewise a problem. However, without the vocabulary of Western thought, I don't think a history student can think well enough to solve a problem. © 2001 - 2011 michael g. maxwell - maxwell learning l.l.c.

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