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Exploring the Louisiana Territory

Inquiry Day!

"Imagine your room, all of the stuff in it. Now imagine how much more stuff you could fit in it if you were to double in size!" This is how our group of Social Studies Super Stars introduce the concept of the Louisiana Purchase, which was one of the greatest land deals of all time. In doubling the size of the U.S., President Jefferson wanted to learn what was out there. He hired the explores Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to lead an expedition through the Louisana Territory. To help them along their way, Louis and Clark hired Sacagawea, a Shoshone Native American woman to be their guide. To bring our students along on their journey, we had a Voki of Meriwether Lewis. The Voki was meant to say that something went wrong in time and he and his partner Clark, never went on their expedition. Something went wrong when we tried to play the Voki for the class. I am not sure if the volume was not working, or the video itself was not working. I had to improvise in the moment and recite the speech that I had written for Lewis to say. Once the students were introduced, the students had eight minutes to work at each of our stations. My station was the exploration of the Rocky Mountains. In that station, there was a reading passage for the students to read and a quiz similar to Kahoot! to play. This station started out with a rocky start, no pun intended. As the game worked like Kahoot!, I believed that the iPads would be able to work the quiz which I made on airconsole.com. However, the iPads were registering as computers on the website and not handheld devices. Because of this, we had to all log into our phone to allow the students to play. In the interest of time and to avoid having my group members unlock their phones everytime they shut off, I used my phone and one other phone to allow the students to play. Another issue arose when it came to the students reading. The passage was a bit long and it took the students a while to read. The first group I had Round Robin read, but some students were too quiet and their group members struggled to follow along. The next groups to follow I had read independently, which allowed us to get to the game faster, but the students had a hard time comprehending what they had read. One group also took a very long time to get through the passage, so they did not get to play the quiz. Doing the station over again, I would definitely pick a shorter passage and maybe read to the students to help them with comprehension. The students who did get to the questions were able to retain the information after we went over the questions, but seemed to be guessing when they answered. It may have also been a better idea to have a video for the students to watch instead of a reading passage. Aside from some technical difficulties, the lesson went fairly well and the majority of our students met our objective on their independent practice which allowed them to report back to President Jefferson on their findings. Great work explorers!

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