Students were to demonstrate their knowledge of Middle Eastern History by completing one of the R.A.F.T. activities. R stands for role, A for audience, F for format and T stands for topic. The most popular assignment by far was the Osama bin Laden wanted poster. I showed students a movie trailer on Seal Team Six as well as news coverage on the capture and killing of bin Laden. I think that's what got them all into the wanted poster! The next most popular assignment was the political cartoon. We did a whole group analysis of cartoons from Jewish and Palestinian perspectives. The kids really enjoyed searching for hidden meanings within the cartoons and I loved seeing all of the "light bulbs" go off as they had that "Oooohhh, I get it now" moment. I live for those! *This student-generated political cartoon is very clever. It shows two pups playing tug-of-war. The pup on the left represents the Jewish point of view (you can see that the colors of the doggie match the colors of the Israeli flag as well as the Star of David on the stomach) and the pup on the right represents the Palestinian perspective (again from the color choices which correlated with the Palestinian flag). The analogy here is that these two groups have been fighting over modern "Israel" for decades. I had a few students do the peace proposal to the United Nations, the Zionism flyer and the letter to the president. I was overall very pleased with the quality of work from students. When they have choice in their assignments, they are more likely to exhibit their talents and demonstrate their understandings. That is why I like using choice boards like the R.A.F.T. I also do tic-tac-toe style and point value assignments in which students choose a variety of tasks to do to reach 100 points. Less rigorous assignments are worth less points and vice versa.
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AuthorVanessa Ellis has been teaching middle grade social studies for 7 years. She is the 2017 Georgia Economics Teacher of the Year and a teacher leader in Muscogee County. She loves to teach and have FUN while doing it! Who says social studies has to be boring? Archives
August 2016
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