For Methods of Teaching Social Studies, I was challenged with an assignment which required me to use and fuse literacy,
technology, arts, and social studies instructional strategies and materials to plan and implement a
comprehensive unit for one grade level. I selected a 3rd grade social studies topic, Geography, and integrated literacy, social studies, and art into five cohesive lesson plans.
My unit includes five lessons that focus heavily on relative and absolute location and comparing communities around the nation. What's so unique about my lesson, however, is the fact that I've also integrated the NFL into it to make it engaging to students and really fun! Click here to view the unit in its entirety!
Lesson 1:
Using technology, students are expected to "find absolute and relative locations of places within the local community and region." The first lesson in the unit specifically focuses on relative location and how students can describe locations using relative location terms. Combined with a writing craft lesson, students work to research an NFL team and write a team biography using all of the information they've collected.
Lesson 2:
Interacting with technology for a second time, students will work to find more specific information about their NFL team's stadium. More specifically, students will come to understand how to graph latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates. Students will also engage a second writing craft lesson in order to revise and publish the NFL team biographies. Once the writing has been finished, students publish their piece with an illustration of their team's helmet.
Lesson 3:
The third lesson dives into the difference between human and physical characteristics. Students will work to research their NFL team's states and identify examples of both human and physical characteristics and illustrate them.
Lesson 4:
Students will work together to compare and contrast their NFL team's state and the state of another NFL team. Using their findings, they will write a paragraph detailing what they discovered.
Lesson 5:
This lesson challenges students to use everything they've learned to create the "ideal NFL stadium." They are expected to brainstorm with a group of their peers to come up with the most essential parts—the "needs"—of a stadium that would make it work for the team's fans. Technology comes into play at the end of the lesson, when students must select and element of their stadium to present. They must tell the class about the element, how it works, why the team made the decision to include it, and share any other relevant information regarding how it works in relationship to the team's relative or absolute locations or the physical and human characteristics of the area.
