Day 2 of Language Arts was a success!

Today I felt like a teacher!  This was a great lesson and the students seemed to be learning a lot about evacuees during World War II.  They were all very excited about being able to become an evacuee and making up an identity for themselves!  The beginning of the lesson went well with the emotion aspect.  They were all understanding and had some great emotions that they thought the children would have.  They also connected to the fact that moving to a place they were not used to with random people would be very hard on them as well.  I had they reflecting in class about what they would think it would be like.

The hardest part for them was really thinking hard about how an emotion felt, smelt, sounded like or looked like.  They knew what a simile was but describing how a baby cries was hard and they really had to think outside of the box.  I wish they would work with each other to help out with words, but they mostly wanted me to help or the classroom teacher was walking around a little.  They did a lot of great thinking and I can’t wait to read what they wrote for their poems when I collect them tomorrow.

Something that I would change would be to add an acting component or a video clip of evacuees so they could physically see and hear people not just a photo.

Overall this lesson was great!  The students loved becoming the part and relating it to history.  They wanted to keep their identities for all of their other classes and that is exciting when they want to continue with something that I did.