Grade Level: 6,7,8
Goals:
*The students will be introduced to six specific port cities.
*The students will get an opportunity to make educated guesses and test their knowledge about the six port cities.
*The students will learn to work cooperatively with a group.
Materials:
*Sheets of white paper
*Port quizzes
*Rubric package--evaluation criteria, duty delegation sheet
Content Areas:
*Language Arts
*Social Studies
*Science
Concepts:
*Oceanography
*Port cities
Procedure:
1. The teacher will introduce our first of six cities--Antwerp, Belgium etc. . . The teacher will give a basic introduction to the city and then administer a short pre-quiz. The students will be broken up into groups of about five and will discuss their opinions and give their input on the city. Then, after enough time has been given, the teacher will ask each group what they put down for the answers to each question. The suggestions that students have will be written by the teacher on large pieces of paper which have the nine questions listed. The students will be asked to explain why they answered as they did for each question. No response will be ruled out. It will be explained that the accurate information will be revealed later. The students will be introduced to a project later in this lesson in which each group will be in charge of presenting information on one of the port cities to the rest of the class. It is then that the class members will find out the accurate information.
2. After these answers have been shared, the teacher will give background information about the next city being discussed, Buenos Aires (see attached sheet). Again, each group of students will receive a new pre-quiz to answer questions about Buenos Aires.
3. This procedure will be repeated until all six cities have been discussed and student input about each city given.
4. Students will be told to keep particular attention to the questions on the quiz which talk about how oceans affect the city. Students will return to their seats and the topic of oceans and the importance of them to port cities will again be discussed as a reflection of their pre-quizzes.
5. Then, the teacher will explain the project that the class will be working on for approximately the next two weeks.
6. The students will be placed into one of six groups and the teacher will explain what the project will entail. Each group will be in charge of doing research and creating a project about a port city. The teacher will assign each group a city and will hand out a rubric package (see attached sheets- evaluation criteria and duty delegation sheet)
7. The project that the students will be working on involves them doing research on different aspects of the city and how the location of the city on a coast affects different areas of the city.
8. The project that the students work on should reflect a great amount of creativity. The students can do a skit, make a video, create a newspaper, make diagrams, play a mock game, etc. or a combination of some of these. The only criteria is that they cover areas including the economy, the people, the climate, the location, the history, etc. and that their presentation to their classmates take at least 15 minutes.
9. The students will be asked to brainstorm different ideas of how to present their information. After giving them a few minutes, they will be asked to share their ideas with the class which will be written down on the board. Then, they can continue brainstorming and come up with an idea of how they will present information. The groups can do any project they want and there may be some repetition of projects because each group will be doing their project on a different city.
10. In the rubric package is a sheet (duty list) where the students can each write his/her name, the city that they have been given to research, their proposed plan of research and presentation, and a list where they will delegate different duties to the members of the group. The projects will be done on the six port cities that have been chosen (New Orleans, Buenos Aires, Yokohama, Antwerp, Sydney, Kuwait).
11. This duty list will not only include the person who holds on to all the paperwork and the person who is in charge of presenting to the class periodically on what is being done, but also will specify who is researching each topic.
12. This project will be on-going and the students will be given time throughout the course of the next couple weeks to work on their project and to present it to the class.
13. Assessment of these projects will be on-going but a final evaluation will be done based on the rubric that the students will be given. The on-going assessment will be done on a daily basis. The students will turn in a written paragraph that expresses their accomplishments for the day and what they need to work on in the upcoming days. These short daily assessments will be pass/fail.
Evaluation: The rubrics that the students receive at the beginning of this lesson will serve as a final evaluation for the group projects. The pre-quizzes are not graded. They are merely to get the students thinking about the port cities.
Approximate time: 4 hours
Resources:
~Allison, Robert J. Australia. Texas: Raintree Steck-Vaughn, 1996. ~Bornoff, Nicholas. Japan. Austin, TX: Raintree Steck-Vaughn, 1997.
~Dahl, Michael S. Australia. Mankato, MN: Bridgestone Book, 1997.
~Dahl, Michael S. Japan. Mankato, MN: Bridgestone Book, 1997.
~Flake, Carol. New Orleans: Behind the Masks of America's Most Exotic City. New York: Grove Press, 1994.
~Fox, Geoffrey. The Land and People of Argentina. New York: Lippincott, 1990.
~Hargrove, Jim. Belgium. Chicago: Children's Press, 1988.
~Heinrichs, Ann. Japan. New York: Children's Press, 1997.
~Hintz, Martin. Argentina. Chicago: Children's Press, 1985.
~Kalman, Bobbie. Japan, the Culture. Toronto: Crabtree Publishing Company, 1989.
~Kuklin, Susan. Kodomo: Children of Japan. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1995.
~Kuwait in Pictures (prepared by the Geography Dept). Minneapolis: Lerner Publications Company, 1989.
~Moore, Robert. Living in Sydney. Morristown, N.J.: Silver Burdett, 1987.
~Morris, Jan. Sydney. New York: Random House, 1992.
~Morrison, Marion. Argentina. Englewood Cliffs: N.J.: Silver Burdett Press, 1989.
~Pateman, Robert. Belgium. New York: M. Cavendish, 1995.
Internet Sites:
~Ocean Summaries
Extensions:
-For a change in this lesson, the students could do the research for the cities as individual projects. If this is done, keep in mind the time for research and actual presentation may need to change.
Teacher's Note: For this project, we have chosen to use a rubric for evaluation. You may chose to use some other type of evaluation, but realize that when using the rubric, you should set the criteria for successful performance for the students. For example, student must have all 3s and 4s for an A, etc. to be successful.
Go to worksheets for the following citits Antwerp, Buenos Aires, New Orleans, Sydney, Kuwait City, Yokohama.
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