Reflection+Egypt

Egypt Project: After the freedom of my Mesopotamia project I wanted to give the students a project with a little more direction to see how they would react to a more specific task. I thought maybe a lot of the repetition I saw in the pervious project could eliminated by having my students work on types of projects that they might not do on their own or think of initially. For this project I had them create a newspaper set in ancient Egypt. The project needed to include three articles, one of which needed to be an editorial, and a political cartoon. The students were instructed that all their content needed to be inline with the period of Egyptian history they selected and their articles needed to read like newspaper articles and not reports. While deciding on their content I told the students that they needed to once again address the themes of social structure, religion, government, daily life, and important figures and events. When the students first started working, they really didn’t seem to know what to do, many of them didn’t even know what an editorial was. I think because the task was so much more difficult than simply reciting information, they didn’t know how to go about starting. They would not be able to just list information, or write a simple report, they would actually have to take what they learned and process it to create something original. Once they got started and got past that road block created by years of simple traditional assessment it seemed most students really embraced this project. The more artistic students focused on the cartoons, the lower level students were given tasks that allowed them to organize easier information, and the high level students tended to work on the editorials or create very good articles. This project really provided something that everyone was able to succeed at while still requiring them to display their knowledge. When walking around the room I tried to listen to some of the conversations students were having. There was a lot of discussion going on, and from an outsiders perspective it would have seemed very chaotic and that little learning was happening. What I heard though, through all the noise, were students who were discussing the topics. They were laughing at the ideas they had, they were brainstorming ideas for the next article, and they were asking questions about certain people and events to make sure they fit into what they were writing. This made me feel very confident that there was actually learning going on and my project was being successful. Once presentations started I had seem many parts of most of the projects and I knew that they were going to be pretty good. Group after group presented well thought out articles that brought together many different ideas and topics that we had gone over in class and mixed that information with some they had researched on their own. Many of the articles and cartoons were very creative and painted a pretty good picture of life in ancient Egypt. I had a few groups that also included things like the weather forecast (complete with the biblical plagues), classified, obituaries, upcoming events, advertisements, and pretty much anything else you might find in a newspaper today. I really felt that this project more so than the pervious one, opened the kids creativity and really allowed them to create a good product. I am also fairly certain after looking at the works they created, that they learned a lot about Egypt, and will be able to retain the information.