Liz Ryan and Catherine Benson Election Awareness Project-Schenectady Christian School

RISP 523L Project Outline October 19, 2004

· Project Title: Election Awareness

· Team Members: Liz Ryan and Catherine Benson, SISP 523L students will be working in collaboration with Liz Bailey, SLMS and Allison Hamm, Third Grade Teacher. Rebecca Garcia and Phil Hsu, SISP 631 students will be designing the web site.

· Audience: We will be designing three lesson plans, incorporating technology, and teaching a third grade class, fourteen students, different aspects of an election.

· Outline of Responsibilities: Together we will raise their awareness of the election through learning the vocabulary associated with elections.

Allison, the third grade teacher has already introduced the vocabulary to the class as spelling words; she is responsible for bringing her class to the lessons each week, and she has volunteered to tie our lesson of election awareness in with other aspects to her social studies lessons, taking place in her classroom.

Liz and Catherine will alternate reading from age-appropriate books to begin each lesson; answer questions from a list the children generated in previous library session; alternate monitoring the children as they research vocabulary words in dictionaries in print version and electronic version and encourage students to compare the results of their findings; Liz baked cookies with vocabulary words written in icing to further promote the first lesson, Catherine will bake cupcakes with flags on them for another lesson; Liz wrote a permission slip for the students to bring home to their parents for approval to be on the Internet, as they search for their vocabulary words on www.bartleby.com; also, students will bring home a sheet Liz designed for the rubric we will be using, showing how the students will be graded, what is expected of the students to achieve top scores in the assessment of the lesson. Liz and Catherine both worked on formulating the rubrics, but only one overall rubric will be used for the assessment. We also have additional plans if time permits and there is more time available to us than we felt the lesson should be allotted. They include: coloring sheets of patriotic symbols are available; more vocabulary sheets are available for students to research; more books are on hand to read; more questions may be answered regarding the presidential responsibilities and the election; students will be able to view an absentee ballot.

Liz B. reviewed the assessments we designed and recommended we use only one for the overall sessions combined, rather than breaking it down session by session. She is available at all times, guiding us, as well as the students. She passed out name tags for all the students so we could familiarize ourselves with them. She meets with us ahead of the lesson and after the lesson is completed to discuss with us how it went.

Rebecca Garcia and Phil Hsu are designing the web site for the final presentation using a voting booth on the splash page . Six of the pointing hands in the voting booth will be used. As the curser moves over pointing hands, there will be a roll over telling what each will contains, when opened. These six links will have the following headings:

Ø Unit Introduction;

Ø Vocabulary;

Ø Lessons – this will open a link to three windows offering the lessons with pictures of students partaking in each of the lessons:

§ Lesson 1 with Photos

§ Lesson 2 with Photos

§ Lesson 3 with Photos;

Ø Technology Integration;

Ø Assessment;

Ø Recommended Readings.

The background of the splash page, behind the image of the polling booth, and subsequent pages will be an opaque flag, in red, white and blue, and won’t detract from the text on the page. The text that will be inserted into the page and the digital photographs of the students will be done by Liz and Catherine, and Rebecca and Phil will be put it up on the web site, on the appropriate pages.

· Timeline: The project will be accomplished in the school in three consecutive Monday mornings, from 9:45-11 am each day, with the follow up assessment done on the fourth Monday. Liz and Catherine arrive early to set up with Liz Bailey and Allison Hamm at 8 a.m., before the class arrives in the library at 9:45 a.m. After the lesson plan is carried out, Liz and Catherine sit with Liz Bailey for a debriefing to analyze the events of the morning and assess the positives and negatives of the way the lesson was accomplished, with constructive criticism offered.

· Description of rubrics: The initial rubrics were designed to access each session, but with Liz Bailey’s input, we decided it was too much, and one assessment will suffice. We designed the rubric to set the children up for opportunities for accomplishment, not failure, with its basis in respecting others. That assessment, designed by Liz Ryan, will be sent home for the students and the parents to read and be aware of what the students are responsible for achievement in all the lessons. We culled our ideas from The Big 6, rubrics.com and Kathy Shrock’s, the lessons will meet NYS Standards.

· Defense of media choices: In reading the September 2004 issue of Scholastic Instructor, we found ideas for lesson plans to raise student awareness of elections. The activities the magazine and web site offered were appropriate for the third grade level (http://teacher.scholastic.com/products/instructor/Sep04_elections.htm Accessed October 16, 2004). We will use the “Electoral Coin Toss”, to help students understand the importance of each vote in an election, help students understand the electoral college and as its voting is done after Election Day. We will also use the activity “Voting Memories”, in which students will interview an adult to ask about the first time he or she voted or ask him or her to discuss a time they voted in an election that stands out in their memory.

For reinforcement of the vocabulary words, the students will also do a word search in a newspaper or magazine, and they will highlight as many of the election vocabulary words they come across. The students will use different resources, such as dictionaries, and compare the results of their search for their vocabulary word in the paper version to the electronic version. Which was easier, faster, more reliable, even was the word able to be retrieved? This reinforcement of vocabulary words will be valuable as the students will be asked to recall their findings the following week to discuss them with the class.

We will split the class up to be able to make use of the computer resources more manageable (Bourgeois, 2004). There are five computers in the library, and the students will alternate using the computers with activities that can be accomplished at the tables.

The adults in the library will float between monitoring what is going on at the tables, with helping students on the computers. Incorporating the use computing technology, such as the use of the Internet can be a powerful tool in the library, and we want to help the students get the benefit of seeing the comparison of the different sources available (Ruthven, Kenneth; Hennessy, Sara; Deaney, Rosemary, 2005).

Another source of information the students will use is the newspaper. According to the article by Colette Yeich, (2002) the newspaper is a valuable tool with many benefits for our lesson of reinforcing the election vocabulary words.

Using newspapers in classrooms as primary resources fulfills many objectives. It helps students to:

* Gain a deeper understanding of candidates, issues, and the election process.

* Study the elections in a context of reality and connectedness to other events.

* Pursue informed discussions about politics and current issues.

* Compare coverage of issues and candidates by different newspapers.

* Strengthen inferential and evaluate comprehension skills.

* Improve analytical reading skills.

* Develop lifetime habits of active participation in the election process and the government.

* Synthesize different sources and writing styles for valuable information.

· Bibliography:

Bourgeois, Michelle. 2004. Managing Your Classroom Computer Center
http://teacher.scholastic.com/technology/tutor/center.htm (Accessed October 16, 2004)

This article discussed using a classroom computer center (Soloway would support this use.)

Harriot, W. A., Martin, S. S. (2004) Using Culturally Responsive Activities to Promote Social Competence and Classroom Community. Teaching Exceptional Children. Sep/Oct2004, 37(1), 48.

This article is refers to how we incorporate the needs of one student in the class, as well as the entire class.

Ruthven, K.; Hennessy, S.; Deaney, R. (2005). Incorporating Internet resources into classroom practice: pedagogical perspectives and strategies of secondary-school subject teachers. Computers & Education; Jan2005, 44(1), 1.

Scholastic Inc. (2004)http://teacher.scholastic.com/products/instructor/Sep04_elections.htm (Accessed October 16, 2004.) This site offers ideas for lesson plans, including Electoral Coin Toss and Voting Memories.

Yeich, C. (2002). Using newspapers to teach about the election: a lesson plan. Social Education, 66(5), 281. This article refers to the use of the newspaper as a valuable tool in our project.

· Integration of Technology in presentation: We plan to show how we incorporated technology into the lesson plans. We may use the example of comparison the students learned in using print resources such as dictionaries, and compare its use to that of www.mydictionary.com, or www.bartleby.com, to find some election vocabulary words. We will also be able to use the jeopardy power point presentation, which has many of the vocabulary answers, to which students must guess the correct vocabulary word in question form, followed by applause.

Page 7 of 7