Keeping up with Current events

Each of us got into small groups and were to deliver a ten minute current events project to our class. My group and I connected our current events project to our unit plan we taught at Bishop Dunn. Our current events project had to do with politics and the budgets in schools. Before class we asked our classmates to read an article about Free School Lunches in schools. For our project we used a cooperative learning method of teaching and used the Think-Pair-Share strategy.

We created a PowerPoint for our class. In the third slide there were two videos for the class to watch. One video talked about how school lunch costs around $1.50, but some students cannot afford that. The second video was about how an elementary school kitchen manager got fired for giving free lunch to students who were crying because they were hungry. Since we only had ten minutes to teach our lesson we did not show these videos to the class, but encouraged the class to watch them on their own time. After the videos we explained the Think-Pair-Share model, what it is and what the students responsibilities are. Now, we asked the class a question "Should schools hire uncertified teachers as substitute teachers?" We asked the class to hold up their agree/disagree cards and then create two groups. All the students who agreed were instructed to go to one side of the classroom and the students who disagreed went to the other side. Now the class was split into two groups and we gave them about a minute to talk about why they felt that way. After a minute we posed another question to the class "Should schools provide the uniforms to their students?" We again

asked the class to hold up their agree and disagree cards. 

Our expectations were that the cycle of splitting up into groups would repeat and we would now have four groups. But, everyone in the class agreed that schools should provide uniforms to students. So, we decided to let the groups stay and just split up so that there was technically four groups that would work together. We gave the class another minute to discuss about the question and their thoughts. 

Now, we asked the students to pull up the Padlet that was linked in to our PowerPoint and answer the three questions. We wanted the students to work collaboratively on this quick assignment. We gave the class about two minutes to work on this. We then went around to each group and began to share. The students had some very well thought out answers to the questions! As an independent practice we wanted to see what the students in our class felt were the top three most important services they felt should be included in school budgets. We taped a string to

the board in the front of the classroom and gave each student a clothespin and small piece of paper. They were to write their
answers on the paper and when they were finished we asked them to hang them on the string on the board! This part worked out really well, the students seemed to really enjoy it and it looked fantastic! Lastly, we had a 123 contact form where the class filled out a final evaluation of their thoughts on our presentation and topic. 

The point of our lesson was to show that politics isn't always black and white. There is usually a grey area. If you are a Republican you may not agree with the Republican party on every single issue, same with Democrat or any other party. We wanted the class to see that there are multiple opinions on issues and because you agree with one issue or topic does not mean you will agree with every issue/topic. Overall, I think our lesson went fantastic! As a group, we really enjoyed planning it and delivering it to the class. The class seemed to enjoy it as well!