JA Activity #1

Finally!!! I started my JA lesson plan this past monday (4 days ago). I been so busy with homework that I just didnt have time to write on this blog...But the time has finally come.
This first thing i would like to share is the fact that I was nervous since the day before. I really tried my best to study the lesson plan so the presentation could come out like I wanted. And I think it did help.

General Information: My site was a middle school located in the southbay. The teacher that accepted me in his class had been of teacher of mine many years ago when I was in middle school. I was really glad he remembered me!! What made this lesson plan activity more interesting was that I was going to team teach with Erica, one of our classmates. The first thing Erica and I did was ask the teacher if we could post the JA banner on her classroom wall. Afterwards, we spoke about how to manage our time and how long the lesson plan would be. The teacher was really excited since he believed it would be a fun way to learn economics for the students.

Finally the students came little by little. They stared at us with confusion but yet interested in knowing what we were doing there. Once they all sat down, the teacher introduced us and afterwards we gave them a brief explanation of the reason for why we were there. They students were excited, and that really helped us feel more confident. The first thing we did was pass out the student workbook and the take home news letter. Many of them were starting to chat among eachother taking guesses on what type of activities they were going to do. Erica was the first one up. She gave the lecture part of the activity while I was going to be in charge of the game. Erica started to talk about the several topics that were going to be covered throughout the activity. Among them were Immigration, Emigration, Entrepreneurship, push and pull factors. Erica explained for a couple of minutes the importance of foreign immigration in the U.S. during the 19th century and about the 5 most important immigration groups that came to the U.S. Among them were the germans, the irish, the scandinavian, the italian and the chinese. While reading their workbooks, I walked around to make sure they were understanding what they were reading and answering questions if they had one.
Once Erica finished talking about the lecture on immigration, it was my turn to talk. I started by explaining how the game was going to work. It was a simple but yet interesting game. The instructions were the following: Students were going to read a small paragraph and they had to match it with the immigrant group that it corresponded to. The title of the game itself portrayed what the purpose of the game was going to be. The title was The Who Am I? game. students were very engaged and at the end told us they had alot of fun. Of course, there were always those students who were trying to be the clowns of the class, but we managed to use that energy to play the game. the forty fives minutes finally passed by and its was time to leave. We told the students that we were going to come back friday (tommorow) t0 do a new activity. A couple of them cheered, causing us to have a smile. Before leaving, we told the teacher how thankful we were and how excited we were to come back on friday.