The Aftermath

When the museum was finished my students were thrilled. They had so much fun teaching other—and mostly older—students about something.

The families of my students that came to our museum were impressed with their children’s enthusiasm and voiced that they were learning things along with their kids. In some homes this unit led to family discussions and independent research by students at home.

Students, teachers, and staff at the school had similar positive reactions. We received many comments and compliments about our thorough research and presentation on this topic. Many teachers asked how I was able to cover this topic with 2^nd graders and why I covered it at all. My response was simple “they asked to learn about this.” The principal of my school stopped me in the office one day and said to me that she was not used to having a 2^nd grader come into her office and ask for her opinion on the war in Iraq. I was a little nervous about what that meant but was put at ease when she told me she thought it was great.

The unit and project really helped my class in many ways. Student interest in learning grew in leaps and bounds. My students all look forward to coming to school and don’t hesitate to ask to learn about something. (They ended up choosing several units of study this year.) My students now see school as a place where they can go to answer their own questions and know that school and education is more than learning things that the teacher says you have to. I am of the opinion that all of this is what has allowed me to have an amazing first year of teaching.

Below is a clip of some of my students in June of 2009, talking about what they remembered learning this year.

Showcasing Our Work

Now we had learned all that we could about the topic and successfully answered all of our questions. What were to do now? Should we just call it a day and leave the unit behind us and move on to the next thing? Should we do something with what we have? I asked my students what they wanted to do. The overwhelming response was to do something with our new knowledge. We discussed our options and settled on the idea of a museum. We would set up our room like a museum and have different artifacts that other students and teachers could come in and view. Each of my students would take up a station and answer questions that our visitors would have. We originally came up with  the following stations:

Timeline of the history of conflicts in Iraq

Religion

Clothing

Art

Where is Iraq?

Language

War in Iraq

Food

Students were assigned to work in pairs on the topics they wanted and came up with what should be displayed and wrote down the facts they had learned about the topic. If they were not satisfied with what they had already learned students were allowed to do further research on their own. Students came up with a list of questions that guests could ask them. I did this because I anticipated a lot of the visitors to have questions and I didn’t want to overwhelm my group of 7 year olds. As we worked on these projects students decided to add a station that would allow guests to have something to do and a station that could show the other interesting facts that just didn’t fit into the categories we had chosen to explore. For this station students created a powerpoint “movie” that listed other facts about Iraq.

All the planning for the museum took about a month. We invited the entire school from grades K-8.

Visitors were instructed to follow masking tape arrows on the floor and to stop and listen at each station. The last stop was the “do something” table. Here we had flyers on how to write to the President and tell him your opinion of the war, a series of paper dolls with traditional Iraqi clothing, a sheet of facts about Iraq to teach others about, a sheet with some words in Arabic, and a crossword puzzle that asked students to recall the knowledge they gained throughout their visit to our museum.

Other Subjects

To answer some other questions students had and to have students obtain a fuller understanding of the topic I decided to incorporate other subjects into the unit. Using maps of Iraq I was able to teach students map skills such as directions, land features, and map keys. Using these maps I was able to teach students about scale. I incorporated math into this and using the scale and paperclips we were able to measure the distance of Iraq. After we measured in paperclips we used the scale to measure how much distance one paperclip equaled. Using this information students skip counted and figured out the true distance across Iraq.

The art teacher at school was interested in this unit and asked how she could help us out in our study. She came up with a unit on Middle Eastern art and had students create symmetrical designs, cuneiform writing, and mosaics.

In addition to the reading groups I also incorporated the unit into read alouds. After reading aloud a short article about Saddam Hussein I read aloud the story Yertle the Turtle by Dr. Seuss. Students were able to make comparisons and connections between the story and what they had learned about Iraq’s history and Saddam Hussein.

Students also were able to draw comparisons to their own lives using this article in IndyKids Newspaper.After reading the article students learned about and used a Venn Diagram to compare and contrasts their lives with the life of Simma the Iraqi girl profiled in the article.

Answering Our Questions

In order to answer their questions I had students break into 3 small groups. Each group would get a different photocopied chapter of a non-fiction book or article about Iraq or the culture. The groups would read their non-fiction text and record their learning on a sheet. The groups would then present what they learned to the other 2 groups and I would chart their understandings on a piece of chart paper. This method helped students understand the purpose of reading non-fiction as well as build an interest in reading to learn and understand. It also helped answer most of the students questions. 

 

 

The result of this process was a floor to ceiling length list of facts about Iraqi culture, history, people and the current war.

 

Goal Setting

Step one for the class was finding out what students already knew and what they wanted to know. We did this process twice. Once for general questions about the country of Iraq and one specifically about the current war in Iraq.

Examining their questions led me to my goals for the unit; which were for students to understand the rich history and culture of the country, and to understand reasons for and consequences of the current war in Iraq.

Planning

 Gathering teaching materials on this topic was more difficult than I anticipated. Finding any materials on Iraq was hard enough but finding materials about Iraq and the war that a 7 year old could understand was a near impossible task. If I was going to do this I was going to need help. After consulting with other social justice oriented teachers, the school librarian, and the art teacher I was able to find these materials.

                       

 

                  

 

 

 

IndyKids Newspaper

 

 

 

Now that I had some materials I had to figure out how to fit this unit of study into the class’ daily schedule. There just wasn’t enough time for me to do this unit on top of all the mandated curricula. During a professional development day I was able to figure out how tie the subject into the upcoming non-fiction reading and writing unit. With this plan in place my class would be able to start the much anticipated study of Iraq.

The Idea

I am a first year 2^nd grade teacher in NYC public school. During the first weeks of school my students asked me a simple question that sparked a 4 month long study and forever changed the understandings my students had about education.

 It was a hectic afternoon and all I wanted to do was get through a simple read aloud, but I was finding it very difficult to do. For starters one student had just thrown up on the rug and this threw the rest of the class into a frenzy. While that student went to the nurse and the custodian came to clean up the mess, I tried desperately to get the group of hyper 7 year olds back on track. I moved us off of the rug and over to the area near a map. I began my read aloud. A hand shot up. “Mike, I have a question. Where is Iraq?”

Not a question I had anticipated from a 7 year old. I told the student that we could look at the map later and carried on with the read aloud, which, despite the previous interruptions went swimmingly. At the end of the read aloud I asked the class if there were any questions. All hands went up. I was excited to see my students’ enthusiasm, the day was picking up. At least that’s what I thought until I heard the questions.

 

“Where is Iraq?”

 

“Why is there a war there?”

 

“Why did Iraq knock down the Twin Towers?”

 

Not one question about the read aloud. Well, I wasn’t going to let this enthusiasm and interest go to waste, but the afternoon on the 4^th day of school, with an impending “surprise” class visit by administration overdue, and without a plan was not the time to capitalize on this moment. I promised students that we would talk about this topic another day, when I had materials. This seemed to satisfy the class. I showed them where Iraq was on the map and we called it a day.