Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Rachel K. Space Colony (Part 1)

SPACE COLONY - The Tiny Frontier

I started a Storypath curriculum entitled SPACE COLONY (always said in all caps because it is always yelled) today. I am so excited for this and have been waiting MONTHS to get going on it.

Students came up with a list of ideas for the types of jobs we will need on our international space station. I refer to the students as colonists, and the class was buzzing with excitement (and talking over each other with excitement as well). We came up with some pretty good jobs, and even some of the more space cadet students seemed to be interested in something or another. I'm looking forward to day 2 when the students will start making job applications and character dolls.

The students finished their job applications and started working on their character dolls. It was a hot mess. I have four boys who want to be the ship captain, so I'm going to decide on whose character has the most impressive job application to award that gem of a job - MWAHAHAHAH JOB APPLICATIONS MATTER. We had a fantastic 90 minutes of fabric cutting, wallpaper sample tracing, book research, Internet research, and lots and lots and LOTS of discussion. All in all, excellent progress so far; my students are inherently good at running around with scissors and making a mess. We'll see what happens when they find out they have to do work, too. Tomorrow will be the completion of the dolls and we will start writing Travel Logs and Introductions to practice their public speaking skills.

The kids got together in groups and made planet posters today. It was hectic, but I threw together a cooperative learning lesson. Each group of 3 students had a job (either manager, creative director, or researcher), and I prepped a lot of research for each planet because we only had 45 minutes to do 90 minutes worth of curriculum. The posters look fine, but if I could do it again, I would have given them black paper and just had them paste colored paper on it instead of starting wtih white paper. I think they would've turned out more interestingly. The class across the way saw how my class' posters turned out and did exactly that. While I am still in the puerile stage of seething that "the other teacher's class' posters look nicer than my students' and that makes me angry," I will get past that and simply revamp my plans for next time.



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