Teaching the last two weeks of
school was a bit of a challenge. As you
can imagine, students (and teachers) are a bit “done” and worksheets, though
never in the plans anyway, were definitely NOT an option. I also had to contend with the fact that I
had been a little too ambitious in my planning and needed to adjust some
assignments and activities in order to make sure the students would have final
products each of the units. I mention
all of this because I wanted to share the fun activity that was born from a
time crunch and a desperate need for an attention grabbing/interest holding
activity for 5th graders in June.
The units were on Manifest Destiny and Westward Expansion, and the
students spent time participating in a variety of activities including 2
Webquests, an outside “simulation” that had the students settling across the
country as they learned about each land acquisition, an Art Walk that
illustrated Westward Expansion, and the final activity—Texting from the Oregon
Trail.
I am including a link to the Webquest that I
created for this activity at the bottom of this entry. Basically, in the interest of time, I had to
cut out a longer assignment and instead of having students create journal
entries from the trail, I had them create a texting conversation between
themselves and friend or family member.
The activity included a research component where, through the Webquest,
they were directed to different websites to research the Oregon
Trail . They were given two
graphic organizers to fill out, one with the research details that needed to be
included in the conversation, and one with “text bubbles” to fill in for a
rough draft of their texting conversation.
The students couldn’t wait to get
to the fake texting site, so they were highly motivated to do the research
component of the Webquest. Some students
even wanted to create a group text between friends that were at different
places on the trail. The activity was
originally scheduled to happen during one of the long blocks (60 minutes) that
5th graders have for Social Studies 3 days a week, but ended up
having to be moved up a day, only giving us 45 minutes to complete the
activity. The 45 minute class was plenty
of time to do the research and rough draft, and a few of the students were able
to complete the actual text messages as well, but most ended up having to
complete the assignment for homework.
The students were excited about playing with the Fake iPhone SMS Generator, so they had no problem finishing the assignment at home--and then moving
on to create additional fake texts for their own purposes, I’m sure!
