Martians attack

I worked with 3 of my peers to create an innovative lesson plan that reflected an integrated curriculum. Our focus was on devising a Cross-curricular lesson that had a creative Minds On to peak our students' interest. We chose 3 subjects to focus on, Social Studies, Language Arts, and Drama, for grade 6 students. We wanted to introduce the students to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and talk about FNMI, which fits in well with the grade 6 curriculum.

Our first idea was to have create anonymous profiles for the students to portray and have them do a Privilege Walk Activity as their new character. We chose 2 FNMI people to base the profiles off of and 2 non-natives. The students would do the privilege walk in their table groups on a game board and afterward they would find out who their character actually was. The idea was to have students see how underprivileged FMNI people are and how poorly they have been treated. Unfortunately, we decided that we did not want to focus too much on privilege because our big idea was why might different groups experience the same development or event in different ways? We had to scrap that idea and came up with the idea that fit into the Drama curriculum; students would still get anonymous profiles to read, but they would also be given a scenario to act out in a group based on their character. The character profiles were created based on people involved in the Residential Schools. However, to put a twist on this activity, we decided that instead of telling the students we were focusing on the Residential Schools, we had the students image that Martians had taken over Earth and were trying to assimilate Earthlings to Martian cultures. After the students acted out their characters as either and Earthling or a Martian we revealed who each profile actually was on the following slideshow:

When we presented this activity to our peers, they thought it was a great idea, which is what we had hoped for. We received a lot of good feedback as well, which I found extremely helpful. Some of our peers suggested that we could use this activity and relate it to both historical or current events. For example instead of Residential Schools the Martians could be the Nazis during WWII or a more current event like the Syrian refugees. I think this was a great suggestion because as a teacher you can use the activity for various events to get students thinking and get a discussion going.

Overall, I think my peers and I collaborated well together to create an innovative lesson that focused on more than one curriculum subject. I really like the idea of an integrated curriculum to show students how everything is connected and this was an interesting concept to implement in this lesson plan. I plan to relate many of my lessons to events that students can relate to and make connections to other curriculum subjects.

 View the full lesson here.