Immigration Stories
Learning Activity Plan 4
Why did the Pilgrims leave their home?
Lorrie Heard
Fall 2013, WOK: History/SS
Clark University
I.
Content: Describe what it is you will teach. What is the content?
This lesson will be the fourth in my Curriculum Unit Plan on immigration. My
Essential Question is why do people leave their homes? and students will
continue to analyze this question by looking at the immigration story of the
Pilgrims.
II.
Learning Goal(s): Describe what specifically students will know and be able to
do after the experience of this class.
Students will expand their knowledge about the Pilgrim’s immigration story
adding to prior knowledge. Students will be able to make connections between the
Pilgrim’s story and the Essential Question of my unit, why do people leave their
homes.
III.
Rationale: Explain how the content and learning goal(s) relate to your
Curriculum Unit Plan learning goals.
This lesson is an important element in the content understanding of this unit. We
will connect to the MA Learning Standards as students will be looking at the
Pilgrims’ immigration story and why they left their home. Students will also be
developing habits of mind and work as they will be practicing collaborative
thinking as well as independent thinking. They will also employ their previous
knowledge of the story of the Pilgrims and use that to make connections to this
lesson and previous lessons in this unit.
IV.
Assessment: Describe how you and your students will know they have reached
your learning goals.
Throughout the lesson I will assess students through observation and conference
sessions as most of the learning will either be done in small groups or as a class. I
will also have an independent assessment that students will complete at the end.
They will have to think about the key elements that they have learned from the
unit so far and bring it together to answer the first two questions: 1. Why did the
Pilgrims leave their homes? 2. What challenges did the Pilgrims face? For
question three they will have to metacognitively think about their learning. They
will finish the KWL chart by thinking about and describing one new thing that
they learned about the Pilgrims from today’s lesson.
V.
Personalization and equity: Describe how you will provide for individual student
strengths and needs. How will you and your lesson consider the needs of each
student and scaffold learning? How specifically will ELL students and students
with learning disabilities gain access and be supported?
My first attempt to personalize this lesson is with the modified KWL chart.
Students will have the opportunity at the beginning of the lesson to brainstorm
what they already know about Pilgrims with their peers, think about what they’d
Learning Activity Plan 4
like to learn about them that they was unclear or they haven’t learned, and later in
an independent assessment share something new that they learned. Because
students have had different experiences with the Pilgrim Story I expect that
students’ knowledge of the story will expand in different ways and students will
learn from the lesson and from each other. There will be a mix of group work and
an independent assignment in this lesson. At the beginning of the lesson, students
will be brainstorming as a group what they already know about Pilgrims. This will
allow students to learn from each other in a lower stakes environment and help
ELL students to participate in the assignment with the support of their peers. The
independent assessment will be low stakes as well and I will provide an extension
question for some of my more advanced students if I think they need more of a
challenge.
VI.
Time
10
min
10
min
15
min
Activity description and agenda
a. Describe the activities that will help your students understand the content of
your class lesson by creating an agenda with time frames for your class. Be
prepared to explain why you think each activity will help students on the path
toward understanding.
Activity
In small groups KWL Chart
1. What do we know about the Pilgrims?
2. What do we want to know about the
Pilgrims? (each child will be
encouraged to share something)
(They will talk about “what they
learned” in the independent assessment)
Rationale
My students have a prior knowledge
about the Pilgrims because they have
learned about them in previous
classrooms. I hope that by sharing
what they already know and what
they want to know, this will help
them to be more engaged with the
lesson material.
One person from each group will share
I want them to have something to
what the group wrote down
think about while we are reading the
- I will document them on chart paper so book – it has helped keep them
students can refer to it during the read
focused and less anxious while we are
aloud and afterwards during discussion
on the rug. I also want them to have
practice sharing/presenting to the
class because it is something that we
have been working a lot on recently
and I would like to continue in my
lesson.
Read Three Young Pilgrims
I want them to actively be thinking
While reading have students think
about our discussion, how the
about:
Pilgrim’s story relates to what we
- The chart we created
have been already learning in past
- Why did the Pilgrims leave their
lessons, and how they can make
homes?
connections to what they already
- What were some of the challenges the know.
Pilgrims faced?
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Learning Activity Plan 4
15
min
Class Discussion
- Why did the Pilgrims leave their
home?
- What were their challenges?
- Did we see connections on our chart in
the story? go through and check the
things that we saw in the book
- What new things did we learned about
the Pilgrims that we could add to this
chart?
- Did we find anything that we were
wondering or wanted to learn?
15
min
Independent Assessment
- Why did the pilgrims leave their
home?
- What was one challenge that the
Pilgrims faced?
- What is one new thing you learned
today about the Pilgrims?
This discussion will bring all of the
areas of knowledge together. This
will help them to come to a complete
understanding of the connections I
want them to make. Because they
topic of the Pilgrims is familiar to
them I want them to be able to have
an expanded understanding and
knowledge on the topic and how it
relates to what we have been learning
in this unit. They will also be
prepared afterwards to complete the
independent assessment.
Through this assessment I will be
able to see how students were
individually coming to an
understanding of the material.
b. What particular challenges, in terms of student learning or implementing
planned activity, do you anticipate and how will you address them?
As always, I expect that students will have some troubles with the
independent work. I will address this challenge by going over instructions for
the assessment with students beforehand as well as my expectations for their
independent work. I also will conference with students who I think will have
some challenges,
VII.
List the Massachusetts Learning Standards this lesson addresses.
Massachusetts Learning Standard 3.3 Identify who the Pilgrims were and
explain why they left Europe to seek religious freedom; describe their journey and
their early years in the Plymouth Colony
VIII.
Reflection
a. In light of all areas of planning, but especially in terms of your stated purpose
and learning goals, in what ways was the activity(ies) successful? How do you
know? In what ways was it not successful? How might the activity be planned
differently another time?
This week’s discussion about Pilgrims went well. They said they know a lot about
Pilgrims and I used this to my advantage in planning and executing this lesson. We
started with the K and W of a KWL chart which worked out very well (examples
attached). For one, we have talked a lot about “what we know” and “what we wonder”
when discussing Historical Fiction stories – we did this early on in the semester when we
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Learning Activity Plan 4
read The Courage of Sarah Noble and so both writing down what we already know as
well as what we wonder, came very easy to my students. They also felt confident and
knowledgeable about the Pilgrims after combining all that everyone in their group knew
for the “what we know” section. I was glad that I had them work in small groups because
they enjoy doing that and also because it definitely was lower stress for all students.
Next, I had students present what they wrote down to the whole class. I probably
didn’t really need to have them share what they already knew with the whole group – it
was very repetitive and it took up a lot more time than I expected. Students also had a lot
of trouble respectfully listening to their classmates which is an issue that we deal with a
lot during presentation type activities. But I did get everything down on a chart which
was helpful to look back at later during the read aloud and when they were thinking about
the new things that they had learned about the Pilgrims.
Out of all of the choices of books that I had, Three Young Pilgrims was definitely
the best option. I thought about having students read from The Magic Treehouse books
but I wasn’t quite sure how to bring that together into a lesson and I thought it might take
up too much time. While Three Young Pilgrims covered the important information that I
wanted to cover – why the pilgrims left their home, their journey to America, their
struggles after arriving in America, and their relationships with the Native Americans and
the first Thanksgiving – it was pretty long, and I had a lot of trouble keeping students
interested.
I ended up breaking the lesson into two parts, which is a strategy I feel that I
learned in my last LAP but it was still a challenge. Because we had been learning a lot
about the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Tribe simultaneously, I didn’t get the sense that
they really considered much from the book in their discussion and later in their
independent assessments (which are attached). It was fine that they did this but it was
hard for me to assess what they learned from my lesson and what they learned from
everything else we’d been spending a lot of learning time covering. If I could do this unit
over, I probably would have started with a lesson or two on the Pilgrims before all the
Thanksgiving discussion began.
The discussion was vibrant though, probably because we had been spending a lot
of time during my lesson and their textbook study from earlier that day learning about the
Pilgrims. When asked why the pilgrims left their home in England students said things as
simple as “their king was mean” to “they wanted freedom to pray and to have their own
church”. It was interesting to look back at our chart and make connections to what we
saw in the story – a lot of the things on our list (in the “what we know” section) were not
in the book and vice versa. I think because the lesson was split between two days it was
harder for them to make the connections, especially when thinking back to the things that
they wondered (which I didn’t chart and which they didn’t really remember). I think that
instead of making this lesson into two parts I should have just attempted to shorten it to
all fit into one day – there was too much disconnect between what we did the first day
and the second day.
b. What did you learn from the experience of this lesson that will inform your
next LAP?
I learned some things with the experience of implementing the presentations. As I
stated earlier in my reflection, I did kind of feel that they weren’t really necessary. I am
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Learning Activity Plan 4
pretty sure that everyone wanted to present and that is why it was so repetitive and took
so long and kind of forced my lesson into two parts. But I also feel that it was important
for them to have this experience of presenting their information in front of the class and
for that reason I feel that it should be tweaked instead of being taken out altogether. I
think one way to make it better is to hold the other students accountable. When one group
was presenting, most people weren’t listening. If they were held accountable (maybe if
they had to actively think of a question or comment for the students presenting) I
definitely think there would have been a lot better engagement and respectable listening
from my other students.
I have been considering different ways to make this a reality in our classroom.
Some elementary classrooms use the Popsicle stick method – I have only seen it a little
bit but I think that with some modeling beforehand, it could really work for my students
and it would be an easy way to get more people participating. During a UPCS round I
also saw a method called “first responder” where the presenter chose someone to make a
comment or ask a question about their work after they were done presenting. I think this
method could also work in my classroom with some modeling about what is an
appropriate way to respond – for the most part, students were engaged with the presenter
as they knew they may have had to prepare a thoughtful response to that students work.
The last thing I will mention that I definitely think should be implemented in my
classroom is something that I saw in Ms. Volpe’s (former MAT!) fourth grade classroom.
As a method of scaffolding for ELLs but also as a method of encouraging thoughtful
questions and comments on students’ presentations she has a chart in her room with
prompts showing appropriate ways to start a response. This could be a modeling aid to
have when implementing either the Popsicle stick method or the first responder method
into our presentation setup.
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