Second Day of Teaching

Our next lesson was our inquiry and direct lesson. Our group decided to do things a little differently and use a different type of inquiry that we have never used before. First, we started with a review of key points from the direct instruction lesson and pre-assessed the students with a word cloud. Then we moved on to our reenactment of the battle of hastings. This was our inquiry method. There was no problem for this method, but you still had to of course follow the steps of inquiry which was tricky. This method of inquiry also involved questioning throughout the lesson, which we did by asking questions and predictions about what might happen next during the reenactment. For the reenactment of the battle, we split the class up into two sides: the normans and the anglo-saxons. Harman was the king for the anglo-saxons, and lead her side, and I was the King William for the normans, and lead my side. The students had fun reenacting the battle and pretending they were a part of it, and it gave them great visual insights on the tactics used by both sides and the weapons. This was a very engaging lesson for the students, and they got a chance to reflect on their expoernece conducting an interview with the opposing side to implement cooperative learning. We should have made the groups bigger as cooperative learning should be in group of more than 3, but we got mixed up a little. It still went smoothly and the students enjoyed finding out different perspectives of both sides and coming up with conclusions about what they would change, or what they would do the same.