Our Constitution in Words

Group 1 after our final lesson!

Today my group taught our final lesson which was Cooperative Learning. This type of lesson was new to everyone in my group; we have never taught a lesson like this before!

Cooperative learning focuses on the students working together in small groups.  In these groups, the students use prior knowledge from the lessons that we taught them to create the projects.  For our projects, we had two groups write poems about the Constitution and the other two groups write a Bill of Rights for their school.

Since the students were going to work in small groups, we went over how people are supposed to work in a group. The students gave a lot of great ideas and on our presentation, we had an acrostic poem of the word "TEAM" for everyone to read together.  This acrostic poem spoke about how to effectively work as a team in their groups.

We gave the students a basic idea of the projects they were going to be creating, but all of their task directions and individual jobs were in their project folders.  We gave each group a project folder that had all the included pages above and there was also pieces of loose leaf and a marker for the students to write their finished project on the scroll poster board.

As I said, each of the students had jobs they had to carry out while they were working in teams.  Assigning the students jobs allows them to be held accountable and to be responsible while they are working with their groups.  The jobs that we gave to the students were:

• facilitators (to make sure everyone was staying on task and keeping the conversation going).
• the scribes (to write down the drafts and the final draft on the poster board).
•  the reporters (present the lesson to the whole class).
•  the noise monitors (to make sure everyone in their group has an appropriate noise level).
• the timekeepers (to make sure that their group is finishing their project within the time frame that was given).
• the inquirer (make sure that their groups questions are answered by a teacher).
• the material manager (make sure that their group had all of the materials they needed to complete their projects).

The students were all very excited about their jobs and took them very seriously; they all did a very good job carrying out the job that they were assigned.

Once the groups finished their projects, it was time to share what they came up with! Before presenting we went over with the fifth graders what qualities make a good presenter and what qualities make a good audience.  This was just to ensure that the students knew not only what we were expecting of them, but what their classmates are going to expect of them when they fill out their peer assessment sheets. While a group was presenting, the audience was filling out "peer assessment" sheets to provide feedback to their peers.  Of course, we told the students that the feedback we give to their classmates should be constructive and respectful.  As these were being filled out, the others were presenting.  All four groups went and they all did a fantastic job!

Finally, for independent practice we had the students complete a magazine interview.  This independent practice was a way for us to see what the students learned since this was the end of our unit plan.  In the interview, the students had to answer three question about the Constitution and our government.  Most of the class did very well with this independent practice and my group gathered that the material we taught stuck with the students.

Overall, it was a great experience teaching the fifth graders.  I had a lot of fun teaching all three lessons to the smart and creative students! Now it is on to group 2 on Thursday and good luck to them!

Below are pictures of all of the groups' completed projects!