First Lesson - March 15th

This morning we taught the introductory lesson to our First Grade Patriotism Unit. Our lesson actually took the place of the class's morning meeting so we broke their routine a little bit. It also was the first time that Ana and I had done any whole-group instruction in this classroom. The fact that we were mixing things up both for the kids and ourselves coupled with the abstract nature of a concept like patriotism made for an interesting lesson to say the least.

We started with an opening discussion of what the students thought patriotism was. The responses we got were all very concrete examples of patriotism, but far from a definition of the concept itself. We also got a lot of blank stares. Regardless, with the help of the classroom teacher and a little bit of our own pizazz we were able to come up with a pretty decent definition of patriotism. However, we wanted to make sure that students understood that you can be patriotic for any country so we invented the marvelous country of FirstGradealonia. I then got into character (by donning a goofy hat) and proceeded to model the Pledge of Allegiance, a patriotic speech, and a traditional dance of my country, FirstGradealonia. I made the kids get up and join in the dance... it was awesome! That part of our lesson was by far the most exciting for the kids. Our classroom teacher commented that it was fantastic because it met them at their level. But the real test of it came when multiple kids commented that the thing they really learned during our lesson was that you can be patriotic for countries other than the US.

If I had to do this lesson again I would change two things:
1) I would script out the exact questions I wanted to use to guide the discussion about patriotism. While there is no way that I could ever anticipate responses like "My mom says that in a few years there will be a woman president." It still would be incredibly helpful to have a stronger set of guiding questions than the ones that I'm able to think up on my feet.

2) On our exit worksheet (formative assessment) we asked students to draw a picture of patriotism from their own lives and then write about something they learned during our lesson. Almost all of the kids spent the entire time on the picture (which was first on the worksheet) and barely had any time to really think about what they were going to write. The order on these two items should have been switched--requiring kids to perform the less-desirable task of writing before moving on to drawing, which they love.