Hi everyone and welcome back to my teaching blog! As discussed in my last post, I am going to be gearing my lesson towards teaching students about the road from the Roaring 20’s all the way to the Great Depression. While in my last post I heavily discussed the lessons and background that I have on this time era, that being my experience with the classic piece of literature, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, I now want to transition into solely focusing on how I will communicate my knowledge on this subject to elementary level students. With that being said, I have decided that this section of American history would be best to introduce to students at a higher elementary grade level, say a fifth or sixth grade class.

The text that my partner and I have chosen specifically for this grade level that targets the discussion points we hope to include into our lesson is the text, What Were the Roaring Twenties?by Michele Mortlock. This short chapter book embodies all the important aspects of what life was like in America during the 20’s, doing so in a way that is geared towards the minds of young students. This piece of literature successfully includes the perfect amount of detail on the subjects discussed without overwhelming the student reader. Mortlock successfully incorporates learning tools such as playful illustrations and a mapped-out timeline of events, helping to engage the youth audience and really make the students interested in the topics being taught. To successfully correlate my lesson back to the teaching methods Mortlock demonstrates in her text, I plan on shaping my lesson mainly around Garner’s theory of visual and spatial intelligence. Based off experience and classroom observations, I personally feel that elementary level student learn best through hands on and visual learning. While my partner and I are still working to narrow down exactly how we will be going about incorporating these methods of teaching into the lesson, we plan of using lots of videos and pictures, potentially having our students work together in pairs on a group project.

One option we are considering for this project would involve students creating their own timeline of the events from the roaring 20’s that we will be specifically discussing in class and that are demonstrated in the book. This project will help the students to interpret the information from their own personal lenses creating artwork to go along with each specific event on the timeline. We feel that this will be an effective way for the students to learn the material, due to them needing to work together to determine what information is most important to take away from the class lessons, and what events should or should not be included on their timelines. So far, the only challenges we have faced were narrowing down our options of literature to use and deciding what grade this lesson should be taught to but feel that our lesson plan is on the right track to being very successful. I am excited to continue to develop this lesson and to share my knowledge on this topic to elementary students!