This lesson plan teaches first through third grade students about justice and different cultures working together through a 30-minute activity. Students will look at images from the Black Lives Matter movement and discuss what they see and how it makes them feel. They will then work in groups to build shapes into structures, demonstrating how collaboration is easier. Finally, students will reflect on why different cultures need to work together and how conflicts can arise when they do not, relating it back to the Black Lives Matter movement in their community.
This lesson plan teaches first through third grade students about justice and different cultures working together through a 30-minute activity. Students will look at images from the Black Lives Matter movement and discuss what they see and how it makes them feel. They will then work in groups to build shapes into structures, demonstrating how collaboration is easier. Finally, students will reflect on why different cultures need to work together and how conflicts can arise when they do not, relating it back to the Black Lives Matter movement in their community.
This lesson plan teaches first through third grade students about justice and different cultures working together through a 30-minute activity. Students will look at images from the Black Lives Matter movement and discuss what they see and how it makes them feel. They will then work in groups to build shapes into structures, demonstrating how collaboration is easier. Finally, students will reflect on why different cultures need to work together and how conflicts can arise when they do not, relating it back to the Black Lives Matter movement in their community.
This lesson plan teaches first through third grade students about justice and different cultures working together through a 30-minute activity. Students will look at images from the Black Lives Matter movement and discuss what they see and how it makes them feel. They will then work in groups to build shapes into structures, demonstrating how collaboration is easier. Finally, students will reflect on why different cultures need to work together and how conflicts can arise when they do not, relating it back to the Black Lives Matter movement in their community.
Unit Topic: Different Cultures Subject/Grade Level: first- third Lesson Duration: About 30 minutes ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS | Factual, Debatable, & Provocative Questions Essential Question(s) for Unit: What is a culture? How does culture affect who you are? Essential Question(s) for Lesson: How do cultures work together?
OBJECTIVES
Knowledge of other cultures
Knowledge of justice
Understanding of importance of cultures working together
Collaboration and group
work skills
ACADEMIC LANGUAGE DEMANDS The vocabulary of this lesson includes the word culture and Black Lives Matter. Students will have prior experience with the vocabulary word culture and have some community exposure to the movement, but they will learn further about this movement. The language demand of this lesson is for students to be able to form and articulate their own reactions after looking at provided artifacts and the learning activity.
STANDARDS SL.2.1 Participate in collaborative conversations with diverse partners about social studies topics with peers and adults in small or larger groups.
RATIONALE It is important for these students to learn about Justice in the Social Studies, cultures, and working together because this knowledge and skills can be used to solve classroom, community and even greater societal issues of justice as a democratic citizen. ASSESSMENTS Knowledge of other cultures will be evaluated through the questioning of students about their prior knowledge about the social movement of Black Lives Matter. This movement encompasses several different cultures, which will later be explained to students. This assessment will be formative, testing the students to see if they are able to identify different aspects of this culture throughout the lesson.
Knowledge of justice will be evaluated through formative assessment as well. Students will be asked to identify this social issue that comes with the Black Lives Matter movement and assess if justice is actually taking place or not. Understanding of importance for cultures to work together will be assessed through summative measures. Students will be asked to identify what happens when this does not occur and to explain why this is important. If students can clearly articulate reasoning then we can clearly evaluate the learning that has taken place. Skills of working together and collaboration can be assessed through the observation of the learning activity where students are asked to work together in order to make a picture. Students will later be asked to reflect on the group work and discuss the skills needed to successfully work together, which will severe as a summative assessment at the end of the lesson. Diagnostic Assessments
In order to gather information about students prior knowledge
about this particular topic, I will ask students about what they already know about the topic and to make observations about images of this movement. Students will have previously learned about what a culture is and different aspects of a culture, so they will have prior knowledge of those concepts in this lesson.
Formative Assessments
Informal questioning throughout the lesson. Teachers will lead
discussions throughout the lesson about how groups of people should be working together and why it is important for different cultures to be able to work together. We will be circulating the room and taking notes on student interactions and conversations during the learning activity. This will help us decide how much scaffolding or further explanation is needed during our final full class discussion and wrap up in the lesson
Summative Assessments
After students engage in the learning activity, we will have a wrap
up full class discussion. Here will come back to our essential question of how do cultures work together. We will guide students to reflection upon their experience by asking how difficult was it to complete the task on your own? How difficult was the task to complete when you worked together? How might cultures need to work together to solve problems that arise in our community? We will be collecting data by writing notes about student responses. This will guide us to decide whether or not students understand the importance of different cultures working effectively together. We will then either move on or use a different example or activity to scaffold student understanding in the future.
DIFFERENTIATION [Because you are not designing your lessons for a specific group of students, youll need to describe in general the following categories given the grade levels of your target students.] Students
Develop mental Assets
Students in these early grades are
normally ranging in reading and writing ability. This lesson will ask students to orally respond so that these different stages of development will not hinder the students participation or products in this lesson. Students at this age are also now being able to see differences among people and beginning to form in-group preferences, this can be an asset to the lesson because this preference can be used for students to reflect upon their own culture but also draw upon them noticing other cultures. Drawing upon the students observations about different culture can help create the students awareness of differences, create respect for one another and emphasize the importance of working together.
Students Prior Knowled ge
Students for this age group generally
know and understand the differences among one another. Students are also either developing or have already developed group work skills. For this lesson they will need to know how to work together with others, why that is important, the consequences of people being unable to work together, and to generally understand that there are different cultures and some are treated unfairly. The lesson will address all of this by asking the students to actively reflect, react, and apply their knowledge onto a situation that affects their own Milwaukee community.
Possible Misconc eptions
A common misconception about the
Black Lives Matter movement is that this movement is for and by members of the black community. We will have students look at pictures of the protest and have them discuss what they see or know. Then we will address and discuss the misconceptions. Another misconception is that this movement does not support that all lives matter. We will use the family dinner metaphor to try to explain the focus of black in this movement.
Individu al Learning Needs
Students in 1st or 2nd grade may
struggle to read. Weve found photos displaying the content, and made.
Students in 1st or 2nd
grade may struggle to read. Weve found photos displaying the content, and made
LESSON CONTENT OUTLINE
[Be sure to include estimated time allotment for each activity] Lesson Opening (about 10-15 minutes)
The purpose of this lesson is to illustrate what happens when
cultures do not work together, emphasizing the importance of being able to work together. We will begin by showing students two pictures of the Black Lives Matter movement. We will then ask students to discuss what they see in each picture and how it makes them feel. This will lead to the essential question of how do cultures work together. Since this movement is active in Milwaukee, many of the students will have either heard of the movement, either from family or media, or are familiar with it. Asking the students about the pictures will help us to see what the students know or do not know about this movement, also allowing us to also address misunderstandings.
Learning Activities (about 15 minutes)
Students will be instructed to break into two groups
depending on month of their birthdays, January through June on the right and July- December on the left. One side gets
sets of cut out squares. The other side then gets a set of cut out triangles. The students are then instructed to work in their groups to build a house. After several minutes of allowing students to attempt to build a house using either only triangles or only squares invite students from both sides to work with one another to make a house. This should take less time than before so allow only one or two minutes, then instruct students to come back for an all class discussion. We will ask the class to reflection upon their experience by asking how difficult was it to complete the task on your own? How difficult was the task to complete when you worked together? How might cultures need to work together to solve problems that arise in our community? Lesson Closing (about 10-15 minutes)
After the discussion of the learning activity, we will the lesson
back towards our beginning theme of the Black Lives matter movement. We will bring up the last picture of the riots from the Black Lives Matter movement and ask students what happens when cultures do not work together. What do we think would happen? Ask students why we should all work together? This movement shows people working together from different cultures to bring justice for one culture. In the summer of 2016, there were protests in Milwaukee that involved violence. People in Milwaukees Black community have felt neglected and left behind for a very long time. If White citizens and Black citizens cannot learn to fix our citys problems peacefully, with everyones voices being heard, our city will continue to fall apart. We have to make sure that everyones life is protected and important, even if theyre not from our culture and dont look like us.
ASSIGNMENTS Students will be asked to create their own comic strip that shows two cultures working together. The comic strip will consist of four squares, where students can draw and use some writing to describe an instance. Attached below is the template for the comic strip. MATERIALS/RESOURCES/TECHNOLOGY This lesson requires a smart board or projector to display the images to the whole class. (see links below for images). There will also need to be sets of manipulative, squares and triangles, to be distributed to the two groups during the learning activity.
SELF-ASSESSMENT In order to determine if the lesson was successful, one must look at the students ability to answer the assessment questions done during and after the learning activities. If the students are able to articulate a clear understanding of the importance of working together, the consequences of not working together, and how cultures can work together, then one can see that learning occurred during the lesson. The students are also asked to create their own comic strip to illustrate an instance of two cultures working together. If students can apply what they learned from this lesson and create their own situation, then it can be seen that that students understood the main ideas of the lesson. Depending on if the lesson was deemed successful or not, we will either return to this topic of cultures working together, providing more examples throughout history and in our community or we will move on to another cultural lesson.
