What are the Building Blocks of an Activity-based Lesson?

What is an activity-based lesson?

- Range of pedagogical approaches to teaching. Its core premises include the
requirement that learning should be based on doing some hands-on activities. The idea
that the notion that children are active learners rather thatn passive recepients of
information. If child is provided the opportunity to explore by their own and provided
an optimum learning environment then the learning becomes joyful and long-lasting.

What is document-based instruction?

- gives students the opportunity to act as historians and social scientists and draw their
own conclusion.
-helps enhance analytic and literacy skills

What is a document?
- Both written sources and non-written artifacts, pictures, and photographs that can help
to understand or tell the story.

Teaching activities

1. TA: Reading a Photograph

-describe the photograph
2. Constructing a Document-based Activity Sheet
-define a broad question
- select documents
- provide students with directions
-provide guiding questions (what, where, who, describe or identify)

How do teachers open an activity-based lesson?

Step 1- Do Now
- Look for a spot on the board where the students can find the do now assignment
- Students can copy notes or a definition; think about answers to a question
- Read a quote or a passage and answer questions
- While they are working-individually, pairs, or in small groups- move around
- Chat individual students and give instructions, check homeworks, feedbacks from a task
The usual carries a memo pad so one can jot down the do now assignment responses
Example: Examining the poster The World has Ears
Step 2-Motivation
- Once the students are settled and the subject is established, establish now a context for
the learning, grab their attention and hold onto it.
 - A motivation can flow from the do now activity (the motivation does not have directly
related to the main idea of the lesson, but it is more effective if it is. ---this provide a
transition from the activity to the social studies concepts
Step 3
- Move the class from the do now or motivational activity to the content, concepts, and
skills of the lesson-----transition (a question by the teacher that connects the
introduction with the lesson, a question by a student, or even a Eureka statement,
where students explain what they discovered about the topic.
- There three samples in the article

Are there perfect questions?

- Using the Blooms taxoxonomy in the structuring of lesson plan.