Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
SLOs
Assessments
Formative Assessment
Discussion, questioning,
thumbs-up/thumbs-down
procedures.
Read student journal work
to observe completion,
use questions to inspire
improvement of
organizing their thoughts.
After 9 minutes, the teacher will leave the classroom, and remove the costume piece.
Body (25 minutes):
The teacher, no longer in character will return to the classroom, and the class will gather on the carpet to
debrief the experience, through readings, sharing, and questioning.
Questions:
How did you feel having to do this job?
What did it feel like to have your work torn up? (to a student who had their paper thrown out)
Did you know that kids your age had to work in conditions that were even worse than this 100 years ago?
The class will read page 254 in their social studies textbook, Voices of Canada, which details the
experience of child factory labourers in early-20 th Century Canada.
How do you think life is better for you now than it would have been for child labourers?
The teacher will explain that the piece of paper they signed was a form of contract, and that child
labourers today will often sign contracts that they do not understand, which give exploitative employers
(questionable) pretext for keeping them bound in labour.
Depending on time factors, and length of discussion, the teacher will then read excerpts from an article
about child labour, and show a brief video of child labour abuses perpetrated today.
Journaling Activity:
Students will write 1) a first-person journal paragraph of their 10-minute experience in a factory, and 2)
a paragraph about how they would have faced working conditions in a factory 100 years ago.
A third question was provided, if students wanted to write a third paragraph: How does it make you feel
to know that there are kids (in countries like India and Bangladesh) who still have to work in factories
like this?
Differentiation: upon completion, several students proposed further questions like How would you feel if
you were a parent with a child who had to work in a factory? I encouraged them to add these questions
to the above questions written on the board, and a number of students wrote responses to the studentgenerated questions. Another student asked if he could draw, and I encouraged him. He drew a great
picture of a factory, which he shared with the class.
Slower learners were in a group with the school resource teacher, who helped them to focus their writing
on a single first-person paragraph about their experience in our factory. Focusing on one of the two
assigned paragraphs led to a marked improvement in the slower groups written work.
Closure (10 minutes):
The teacher will lead a brief class discussion about the activity, and inquire if students better understand
the conditions faced by children in Canadian factories 100 years ago, and in different countries now.
Note: this section of the lesson included sharing of responses from several students.
Post-lesson notes:
-My Grade Five practicum class is a very talkative class, which can be both productive and nonproductive. We had a long and fruitful discussion about their experiences in our imaginary factory, which
took longer than intended. After some discussion with Mrs. Sampson, we decided that the videos and
article Id selected to share with the kids about modern-day child labour were a little too pointed, and
opted not to show them, though I did mention a few of the companies that were guilty of modern day
child labour, like Nike.
-Also, our school resource teacher Mrs. Eckhart was scheduled to help the class during this period, so we
opted to cut our class discussion time short, and she took several of the slower learners with her to work
on their responses when the class broke off to write in their Social Studies journals.
-At the end of the lesson, several of the learners who went with Mrs. Eckhart wanted to share their
responses, as did one of the students in the main group. They shared their written work, which was of
superior quality! One student in particular, Anna, wrote something far better than anything Id seen
from her in the practicum. During our teacher debrief, Mrs. Sampson commented that this experiential
lesson had been a great way to reach students who are not generally served by a read and respond
approach. This was an eye-opening experience, and will shape future Social Studies lessons I teach!