Lessons for Beating Summertime Fever | Special Education
Posted by Amanda Kenuam on Wed, May 26, 2010
Wrapping up the School Year
‘Summertime Fever' is in the air as the school year is coming to an end. Many students are excited for the end of the year parties, classroom activities, and graduations and are looking forward to summer camps and summer travels. This makes focusing on activities, lessons, presentations, and homework a challenge. One way to engage your students for the last few weeks of the school year is by incorporating something new and exciting into your classroom including technology or computing.
Emerging Technology
One of the lessons that I save for the end of the year is for students to learn about emerging technology. The students learn about virtual reality, e-books, wireless networks, cell phone technology, and robots. I also show a presentation highlighting the development over time of different technologies. The students are always surprised to see the major advancements of computer, calculators, telephones, audio players, televisions, and video games. This lesson can easily be adapted for a history lesson on technology.
Robots
The lesson on robots begins with a question for the students. When they think of a robot, what do they think of? Many students respond with popular figures from television shows and the movies. We discuss the purposes of the robots and how they all help humans to complete a task whether it is saving the good guys from enemies, cleaning the house, saving the world, or for entertainment. I correlate those fictional robots to robots in real life like the Roomba, surgery Robots, bomb detonators, Ariel spy planes, among other helpful robots. Defining the difference between a robot and a machine and that not all robots look like humans are key concept they should learn.
The creative assignment for this lesson is that the students are to then come up with their own idea of what they believe robots will be like in the future. Along with a written description, students are required to create a 3-d model. I encourage the students to re-use materials from home like empty paper towel and toilet rolls, Kleenex boxes, extra buttons, or string. The students then share their robots with their peers and then the students vote on the most functional, creative, original, and integrated. This is a great end of the year activity involving technology to keep students focused and learning through the end of the school year. I'll be sure to post links to pictures after the students finish up their robots!
Other Fun End-of-the-Year Lessons
The Teachers Corner provides activities for creating a memory book, word searches, worksheets, word scrambles, and end of the year vacation calendar.
Education World has educational lessons for the end of the year the encourage students to continue learning even through the last day of school. The activities include problem solving, creating a book on tape, creating ‘teacher' report cards, holding a classroom auction of items (includes math), and drama presentations about the decades.
On The Lesson Plans Page a lesson has been posted about having the students create end of the year PowerPoint presentations including photographs from the school year. Another twist on the project is to have students take pictures around the school or the classroom with digital cameras of the last few days of school and then add them into the presentation with background music. You can then share the presentations on the last day of school.
-Article by Laura Ketcham
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