Field Work Nov. 14, 2008

Week Two
This week we taught three lessons; on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The lesson on Monday was a Literary Arts/Social Studies lesson. We used the stories of Cinderella from different cultures and compared and contrast them to the Cinderella story we grew up with. This lesson was designed to introduce the students to social studies. We wanted the students to understand that each culture has their own versions of a familiar fairy tale. The lesson went pretty good, the students were excited to have us teach and were eager to read the stories. We were caught off guard by some of the boys saying that they had never heard the story of Cinderella, we had a student paraphrase the story to help them. We were also surprised by how quickly the time went. We had planned on the lesson being about twenty minutes but we needed about an hour to do the whole lesson.
On Wednesday, we started our Unit on Egyptian Hieroglyphs. The first lesson we taught used the Egyptian Hieroglyphs alphabet. We first had the students come up with their own hieroglyphs. We even sent a student out of the room and then had the other students come up with a message for that student to translate. We then gave the students their own copy of the hieroglyphs a-z. We went over each letter, explaining that the letters and the sounds they make. We then gave each student an opportunity to write their own names using the hieroglyphs. After they had experimented with the hieroglyphs for a little while; we gave them a secret message for them to translate into English. They really enjoyed this lesson. We had to keep reminding them that the spelling wouldn't be right because the Egyptians wrote using sounds in the word. We really would have loved more time with this lesson also. We used about an hour and we would have liked an extra half hour to finish the lesson and tie up loose ends.
On Friday, we used the Egyptian alphabet to create a Cartouche. We went over the alphabet again and discussed any questions and concerns. We talked about what a cartouche was, what it symbolized, and why they were made. Then we explained how to make the cartouche and let them work. After they had written their name in bright colors outlined in black, they spread glue all over their cartouche and we covered it with sand. Then we glued a gold cord around the cartouche and placed a Popsicle stick at the bottom. This activity was a lot of fun. The timing was better for this lesson we had everyone done within an hour. We used a hot glue gun to glue on the gold cord and we only had one so it was kinda slow there. The students had to wait in line in order to get their cord glued. Some students didn't want to wait in line so they just glued their cord on with regular glue or chose not to have one, and they just glued the stick on. We also ran out of the gold cord, and we had to bring more on Monday to finish up those that didn't get any. It was a crazy week, and it was hard to know how to gauge our time and our supplies.