Columbus Treasure Hunt & Poetry Slam!!

Today we taught our fifth graders using two methods that would get them working together!  These two methods were inquiry learning and cooperative learning.  Inquiry learning and cooperative learning were both new lesson methods for me and my group mates but we put together two good lessons for the students.

The first lesson we taught using inquiry learning, which uses the steps of the scientific method.  My group and I made a Columbus treasure hunt and gave the students the problem of the King and Queen not wanting to fund another voyage for Columbus and he needs your help to convince them.  The first thing that we had the students do was formulate a hypothesis based off of the problem that we had just given them.  After they formulated their hypothesis they were given their first clue which was to help Columbus locate the coordinates of different places.  Once the students had gone through all of the different clues they wrote a letter to the King and Queen about why they believed Columbus should go on another voyage.  They used the data that they found throughout the activity to help them write their letter.  One thing that we could have had the students do was after they had finished finding all of their clues we could have had them share if their hypothesis was right or wrong with the class.  After we finished with our inquiry lesson we moved right to our cooperative learning lesson which was a poetry slam.

For this lesson, we started with a quick presentation of what the students were going to be doing.  How they were going to be working together to make a poem and at the end they were going to present it to the class.  We also went over presenting skills with the students, so that they did their best!  We kept the students in the same groups that they were already in and we assigned each group a topic based on what they learned in direct instruction.  Within the groups we gave each of the students a role, one student was the scribe, one was the illustrator and there were many others.  This way each student was contributing to the group and also staying on task.  Once the groups were finished with their poems it was time to present!  I noticed that while some of the groups were presenting other students were talking with their friends, so making sure that the class is quiet before the group presents.  The students did a really good job creating poems and pictures about their topics!

Overall it was a really great experience getting to teach three different lessons to a whole class.  The different types of lessons that I learned I will definitely want to incorporate when I have my future classroom.  The techniques that I have learned from this experience will help me all throughout my future teaching career.