Grace Barker (Social Studies) Nicole Hancock (Social Studies) Standards: This lesson works in conjunction with the

Illinois State Standards. y CC.9-10.SL.5 Presentation of Knowledge and Ideas: Make strategic use of digital media (e.g., textual, graphical, audio, visual, and interactive elements) in presentations to enhance understanding of findings, reasoning, and evidence and to add interest. CC.9-10.L.4.c Vocabulary Acquisition and Use: Consult general and specialized reference materials (e.g., dictionaries, glossaries, thesauruses), both print and digital, to find the pronunciation of a word or determine or clarify its precise meaning, its part of speech, or its etymology.

Procedures: 1. DR-TA: Students will get the article; they will have 30 seconds to read the title, look at pictures, read captions, etc. to get a quick glimpse as to what the article will be about. The teacher will then ask the students to guess what the article is about. All guesses will be written on the board. We will read the first paragraph, then talk as a group about what the students think the article is about. We will repeat this process with the second paragraph as well. 2. The students will be split up into four groups to finish the article. Each group will be assigned two paragraphs until the remainder of the article is distributed. They will be directed to look for confusing words that they would like to discuss as a group. We will write all of the hard words on the board, and choose 4 words as a class to look up and learn. a. Some choice words from the article could include: amiable, consensus, depicting, persona, inadvertently, reminiscent, clashes, adjunct, montage, lamebrained 3. The class will split up into the same 4 groups, and the each group will be assigned one word to define and explain to the class what the sentence means. These four words will be added to our class word wall 4. We will then shift gears to teaching the historical views of the poor in America. We will ask the students what they know about living as a poor American during the Great Depression. We will write everything we know about the subject. a. Possible leading questions are: the years of the Great Depression, the thoughts they associate with when thinking of this era, possible jobs of the poor, living conditions, how much money was needed to survive b. We will present students with information about the Great Depression: i. Dates 1929- late 1930s/early 1940s ii. Began on September 4th, 1929 when the stock market crashed. AKA Black Tuesday iii. All countries were affected; not just America. iv. 5. We will then show a clip from Charlie Chaplin s Factory Work
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnOyMSEWNTs

Assessment: We will lead an activity that is to be done individually by the students. Instructions will be after the video is shown, write 2 paragraphs on your outlook on life in the Depression and how you would feel living under those conditions. What would you do to help yourself rise above it.

Rationale We began our lesson with Directed Reading-Thinking Activity because we really liked the strategy of having students predict what the article is about. Many times the title of the article or text can be deceiving. We began by just talking about the title of the article and what students think it would be about, and then read the first paragraph. After that we again discussed what the students thought the article would be about. Following that we read the second paragraph out loud as a full class. We think that introducing the article that way allows students to become engaged, and since there really is no wrong answer, it encourages many different types of students to participate. We then broke them down into groups to finish reading the article, and assigned them each 2 paragraphs to read and pick out one vocabulary word that they are required to look up and explain the word in the sentence to the entire class. We think this is an effective tool because students are working collectively to produce the meaning of the word. As history students we never really thought about the vocabulary of the document. When one hears vocabulary they usually think it s taught in English classes, however, there are going to many words in historical documents that will baffle our students. Therefore presenting the vocabulary words and writing them on the word wall, the students who are learning from each other will be more likely to remember them. Following that we, as history teachers, had to teach something historical so we pulled the great depression out of the article and asked first what they knew about it to build their prior knowledge. After teaching about that we chose a clip from a movie by Charlie Chaplin depicting conditions of factory workers in the great depression. Movie clips, we think are an extremely effective tool in teaching because it s presenting information in a different media which students typically respond to. Following the movie clip, we assessed the student s knowledge of the great depression and connected it to the article about the conditions of the poor. We asked them to write about what it would be like to

live in those conditions and how they would live in poor conditions. For example, what if they didn t have the luxuries they do now? How would it affect them? This stimulates students thinking about life in the Great Depression and helps them learn and remember about the Great Depression.