Juan Ponce de Leon (Lesson 2)

(Taught 3/22)

Even though we're both pretty interested in Latin America, TP has a very strong passion for all things even remotely related to Spanish, so it was decided from the beginning that she would teach the lesson on Juan Ponce de Leon (solely based on the fact that his name was Spanish :) ). It was a little harder to find information and resources on Ponce de Leon, but she was able to find a poem and treasure hunt activity, and her lesson was well received by the students and Ms. K.

TP opened with a review of Christopher Columbus and then read a poem about Juan Ponce de Leon. That, and a supplemental teacher directed lesson served to give the students the information they needed about this explorer. As with the Columbus lesson that I taught, students worked on completing their "explorer detective books" as the lesson was being taught. From the perspective of an observer, I noticed that ths was really distracting for the students. As TP was teaching, students would raise hands and ask unrelated questions so that they could answer them in their book (for example, if TP was talking about what Ponce de Leon discovered, the students might be asking what country he travelled for). I hadn't noticed this when I taught, but it probably happened then too (sometimes its hard to notice these things when you are in front of the classroom). After that, the original plan was for the students to do a scavenger hunt where they looked for objects related to Juan Ponce de Leon. However, TP had noticed that the hunt she was planning on using required students to go in one direction simultaneously, and that it wouldn't work well in the classroom. She decided to alter it so that students had strips of things Ponce de Leon did that they had to match to a picture that represented that clue. It was kind of simple (they matched the picture to the clue that referenced or related to it) but it was helpful for getting the students to look at the material again. They glued these into their social studies notebooks, which is something that Ms. K has them do a lot.

TP then added a Juan Ponce de Leon icon to the timeline and showed the students the path taken in this exploreres travels. Again, the lesson seemed to go pretty well. I think that a scavenger hunt might have been more fun for the kids, but I understand how and why it didn't work, and the kids did seem to get a good understanding of the material, as was indicated by the next lesson.