This week is going to probably be one of my most stressful weeks of the semester. I have a lesson plan and a grammar worksheet (of sorts) due on Friday, a group presentation Thursday and I am spending all day tomorrow at a high school.
You'd think I'd be working.
Nope.
It's not exactly a want for motivation, per se. I am simply a chronic procrastinator. I have always been this way. Somehow, a switch just goes off in my head when it's time for me to not work, and instead I find myself trolling the internet, watching TV with my cat, reading, or indulging myself with unearned video game time. I also tend to fall victim to the "I can't work with a messy condo" syndrome and end up doing a full clean sweep of the whole living space, most of which ends up being completely unnecessary. I think everyone does that.
This blog is more or less a procrastination piece. Food for thought.
In other news, I found out about my practicum! I get to teach history!
EEP.
Here I was, panicking about whether or not I knew enough about French to justify me teaching it, and now I need to shift that panic toward figuring out whether or not I know enough about CANADIAN HISTORY to justify teaching that as well. Our wonderful professor gave us some strategies and book recommendations to get our Canadian history knowledge in check, so I hope to be able to work on some of that before Orientation next week. We'll see. It's bad enough that my lesson plan is going to be for a unit that I already find relatively dull, now the odds are very high that I will be relegated to TEACHING it next month. Sounds like it is time for me to develop strategies to make history fun.
I don't think I can justify sitting on my butt any longer, I gotta get back to work.
I'll post more fruitfully when I'm not buried under giant mounds of work.
Ciao!
I loved my Canadian History teacher in high school. He gave us the best projects -- we had to make portfolios of various WWI "artefacts" (that we created ourselves -- and we could choose from a variety of things to create; maps, or poems, or letters from soldiers, or posters for the war effort back home..etc etc).
ReplyDeleteThe other thing he did? We were put into groups of four or five, and were given various topics from specific decades (so, my topic was Entertainment in the 1920s) and each group had to research and then teach the class their topic... we had a blast talking about the history of cinema, and flappers, and it was awesome!
Ohh! You could have your kids create podcasts, acting as news reporters telling about various parts of the war!
You can definitely make it come alive -- let the kids do lots of presenting to each other, and lots of creative projects.
I'm not even sure which topic of Canadian History you're teaching, but these were just some things I loved my history teachers doing when I was in high school! :-)
If you ever want to bounce ideas around, just let me know!
I totally wish I saw this comment before I finished planning my lesson, but those are fantastic ideas! In fact, we've talked about how to use similar strategies in our classes to make history actually interesting.
ReplyDeleteMy lesson plan was on Causes of WWII, and while it wasn't as interesting as it could've been, I liked the activities I planned. I created a group activity where groups of students would get a cause of WWII, and they would have to guess why it would cause the war. Then I had a radio broadcast that I would play in class with some questions about why Canada went to war.
We had to plan a unit for Canadian History, and my group chose WWII (go figure). We also had to plan a culminating activity which I LOVED. We decided that we would get the students to write a letter either as a soldier, a survivor of the Holocaust, or as a civilian, and they would be writing to someone about the war. I'm probably not explaining it the best NOW (me so tired), but yeah.
Hope you're doing okay!
Those sound like great activities -- anything to make it come alive, allowing the students to be creative!
ReplyDelete