Title: Let’s Learn About Our Presidents!
Objectives: Students will choose a president they want to learn about. Working in cooperative groups, students
will select important facts from a non-fiction book about various presidents
and write them on a large piece of paper for display. Students will learn that a biography gives you information
about a person. Students will be
able to share the information they learned about their president.
Goal: To use the STAD (Teaching, Team Study, Testing, Team Recognition)
method to help students develop an understanding of past or present
presidents. As part of our
curriculum, students need to know that the leader of our country is called the
President. We do this cooperative
lesson around Presidents’ Day so that students can learn how to choose
important facts from a non-fiction book and develop a better understanding of
the president as the leader of our nation.
Age Level: Second Grade
Time: Four
Days
Group Size: 3
students
Procedure:
Day 1: (Teaching) The teacher leads the whole class in a discussion
about leaders. He or she will show
a map of the United States and locate the state of Ohio and the city in which
the school is located. The teacher
will then tell how a mayor is the leader of a city, a governor is the leader of
a state, and a president is the leader of a country. The children will draw a triangle on a piece of construction
paper and divide it into three parts.
On the bottom section of the triangle the children will write the
sentence, “A Mayor is the leader of a city” and draw symbols that
remind them of their city. On the
middle section they will write, “A Governor is the leader of a
state” and again they will draw symbols for the state of Ohio. On the top section of the triangle, the
students will write about the President being the leader of the United States
and draw the flag or the White House.
Day 2: (Teaching) The teacher
will tell the children that in honor of Presidents’ Day they will be
reading about different Presidents.
Again, the teacher will review that the President is the leader of our
country. As a whole group, the
class will generate a list of Presidents that they would like to know more
about. Once the list is complete
the teacher will assign students to groups based on interest and ability
level. The teacher will then read
a non-fiction biography book about a president. First, review what a biography is and what type of
information a reader can expect to find in a biography. Next, model how to select facts that
are important from the text.
Post-it notes work well for this.
Students could simply place a post-it note over the sentence they think
contains the important information.
It is important that the teacher models this technique first.
Day 3: Explain
that each group will be responsible for reading a book about a president and
finding important facts about each one.
For example, where he was born, when he was president, what he is
remembered for and so on. The
teacher will then assign certain roles to each group member. One should be the reader, one should be
responsible for listening for the important information, and the other student
should write the information on a post-it note. After they have read the book and found the information, the
group will draw a picture of the president in the center of the paper. They will then draw lines (like a web)
around the president and write the information they found. All students should take a turn writing
and coloring the picture.
Day 4: (Team
Study) Each child will take a turn
asking another group member to retell facts about the group’s
president. Then, each group will
present their work. Each group
member should read a piece of the information so that they all participate.
Team Recognition: Each group could receive a certificate
if they completed all parts of the project and worked well together.
Positive
Interdependence: Each child has a role and they all need
to contribute in order to complete the final project. There is no competition, as the group wants to work together
to get their information and create a poster that is unique. The children always have a lot of fun
doing this.
Individual
Accountability: This is important because each child
has a specific role or job in the group (Reader, recorder, listener). Each child is responsible for his or
her role.
Social Skills: Every
student can practice social skills with this project. As they work together on the drawing, they need to
communicate as they decide who will draw, color, and write. They will also need to decide how to
draw the picture and who will read each piece of information to the class when
they present their project. They
also need to be able to discuss problems if they arise.
Face-to-Face
Interaction: The children discuss their picture or
problems that arise in their small group.
This is done in a face-to-face manner.
Heterogeneous
Grouping: It is important that the teacher assign
children to groups before the project begins. Make sure that you create mixed ability groups and think
about how to modify activities for special needs kids. For example, a struggling reader should
be given the job of listener.
Processing: After
the project is finished, students ask each other to state the facts they
learned about their president.
Also, each group presents the information to the class.
Evaluation: (Evaluation/Testing) In second grade, each student
is given a grade of S, N, or U in social studies. I would “test” the students based on the facts
they found. If they have at least
4 important facts, a picture, and each child reads a fact from the poster, they
will receive an S (satisfactory).
I would also based a student’s grade on the following:
~Did each group member
contribute by writing some information and helping with the picture?
(observation)
~Did each student do what
his or her role required? (observation)
~Was the group able to find
important information from the book?
~Students could rate each
other on the performance of each member.
Cooperative group work
helps to build a cohesive classroom community. A lesson that is structured so that students have to work
together towards a common goal and each child has a role helps build community. In chapter 7 S&S write about how
students learn more and are able to cooperate with students of other ethnic
cultures when involved in cooperative investigations. Students working in cooperative groups also “are
linked together interdependently in cooperative learning so that there is a
positive association among all students.” (Schmuck 40). In Mara’s book she lists the
characteristics of a community, and cooperative group work has many of these
characteristics. The two that
really stand out for me are shared goals and objectives and connectedness and
trust. When kids are in
cooperative groups they are working towards a common goal. They also feel connected because they
each have a job so they are all valued members of the group. Cooperative learning is a very powerful
tool that can help build relationships among students!