This classroom lesson was presented to 6th grade students, in which they learned about 3 components of Citizenship: Respect, Responsibility, and Resourcefulness. Lesson activities and summaries can be found below.
Lesson 1: Respect
-Corner 2: Cats
-Corner 3: Fish
-Corner 4: Other/None (including more than one type of pet)
Lesson 2: Responsibility
Lesson 3: Resourcefulness
- In this lesson, students learned about respect and ways to show respect and kindness throughout their school and community. The lesson began with a "Four Corners" activity to get the students moving, in which I gave them a topic and they were asked to go to the corner that applied to them.
- Example: Your Pets
-Corner 2: Cats
-Corner 3: Fish
-Corner 4: Other/None (including more than one type of pet)
- The students can always choose to "opt-out" of any question by simply going to the middle of the classroom. The activity was followed by a "Random Acts of Kindness" poster displayed in the classroom. Throughout the following week, students were challenged to show random acts of kindness and write it on a post-it to display on our class poster. This encouraged other students to join in the movement and practice kindness.
Lesson 2: Responsibility
- Students in middle school begin to receive more responsibilities, making time management very important. In this lesson, students learn about time management and the importance of balancing priorities with the things they want to do. Frantic Fred's week is a great activity that students can relate to, and a copy of it can be found above (activity adapted fromdese.mo.gov). The students are able to practice prioritizing and balancing their daily responsibilities using a fun worksheet. They also took a quiz in this lesson, which I created, to give them an idea of how responsible they already are. This quiz consists of scenarios in which they must choose what they would most likely do in a given situation. A score is provided at the end, and they are able to see which areas they demonstrate responsibility, and which areas may need improvement.
Lesson 3: Resourcefulness
- Teaching resourcefulness to middle school students can be difficult, because they sometimes do not see how it applies to them and it can seem a bit abstract. I wanted to teach students resourcefulness to show them how being resourceful can make them better citizens in their communities. I showed an inspiring video called "Landfill Harmonic: The World Sends us Garbage, We Send Back Music" (https://vimeo.com/52711779), which portrays the story of children living in poverty who are able to make the most out of the resources they have. It also shows how being resourceful can make the community better by recycling and being innovative with materials rather than being wasteful. Following the video, the students worked in pairs to create their own (hypothetical) community service project. They were asked to consider materials and resources they would need, help they may need, and also potential barriers. This worksheet can be found above.