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.
Tags: 2nd grade, ASL, Education, Integrating Curricula, Iraq, Sign Language, Social Justice, War
