Go Animate the 20th Century!

Day One: Students are divided into five groups of four and assigned page numbers from their Social Studies book to preview. Each group is assigned a different topic: World War I, World War II, The Great Depression, The Space Race and the Civil Rights Movement. Groups read the relevant text together and create an outline of the material they read. This is recorded on giant chart paper. Groups practice how they will present their outline in a fun way to get their classmates excited about starting this topic.

Days Two- Five: Class starts with groups presenting their outlines to get us excited about their topic. Teacher follows up with a 20 minute lesson, featuring video clips on the overhead projector related to the topic, lecturing and reading aloud from the text book to emphasize important points. Class ends with a formative assessment (eg. Cloze procedure, true/false questions, journal entry etc.)

Day Six: Review with a Jeopardy style game built at http://jeopardylabs.com/

Day Seven: Test

Days Eight- Fourteen: Go Animate! This is the part where students get to create an animation to demonstrate what they learned over the course of their unit. Students choose any of the five topics covered in this unit and build a storyboard of how they want to their animation to look. Next, they log on to the website goanimate.com to create a 30second animation featuring various characters, backgrounds, speech bubbles, music, effects etc. Finished products are displayed on our class blog and shared with the younger grades as introductions to the topics they will be studying.