For my next lesson we focused on the preamble and our personal rights and freedoms. The standard we focused on was:
For this lesson we really wanted to get the students to understand that we all have rights and the rights and freedoms we have were highly important to the founding fathers.
To begin the lesson we discussed what the students knew about the preamble, defined what the preamble was for the students, and discussed how personal rights and freedoms were important to the men that founded the country.
We then asked the students what they thought happens when their personal rights and freedoms interfere with someone elses. We told the students that we would watch a video, that might be the answer to the question we posed. We asked the students to pay close attention to the different positions in the clip, and to think what side of the issue they would be on.
We played a news clip from the Today Show for them on a student with peanut allergy, how her allergy was effecting the other students in the school, and what opinions different parents, students, and experts had on the issue. The video can be found here:
After the video we had the students pick a side of the argument, and fill out a graphic organizer that would help them construct an argument either agreeing with the child with peanut allergy parents or with the other parents in the video. We found a very helpful graphic organizer from Mrs. London's teacher resource blog that can be found here:
The graphic organizer really helped organize the students thoughts, and allowed them to reflect on the video and choose what side of the issue they were on.
After feeling out the graphic organizer the students chose to go to one side of the room if they agreed with the child with peanut allergies parents or the other side if they agreed with the other students parents. The students that remained undecided stayed in the middle of the room, and were allowed to listen to the other students arguments on the issue, and pick a side when they were ready.
The debate went amazing, their were passionate students on both sides of the debate, and the students were allowed to move to either side as their opinions changed on the issue.
After the students debated, we reviewed what the preamble was and why it was important to our personal rights and the constitution.
This lesson was highly engaging and the students were still talking about it even after our class was over.
For my last social studies lesson, the students will be focusing on the bill or rights, and how the constitution wasn't perfect at first and needed some changes so everyone could have the personal freedoms and liberties they deserve.
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