Lesson Plans are the expressions of creative teachers!
So put your thinking caps on and be creative!
Essential Questions For Song of Sampo Lake Unit:
- What does it mean to be an American Citizen? How is someone an American Citizen?
- How are family relationships helpful in life? (Think of your life and the lives of Matti and his family)
- What does it mean to live the American Dream?
- What could you do to better your life, what changes could you make?
Plan of action for teaching with "Song of Sampo Lake"!
- Start with the vocabulary activities to insure a strong understanding of the common terms throughout the story. Have fun with them and really utilize them as tools to help students comprehend the story and lesson plans better! Have the definitions handy for students to refer to while reading if need be, and encourage students to jot down any words they're unfamiliar with, characters and situations introduced, something that interested them, or something they want to know more about. Chart for ideas (printable)
- Introduce the book and begin reading aloud to the class (hopefully you can have multiple copies but if not that's ok too). Also introduce this essential question: ??
- After reading the first chapter or first scheduled reading time, introduce the topic of immigration on a deeper level with your class. Here's a lesson plan plus resources and additional ideas for more lesson plans all about immigration! Immigration lesson
- Continue reading the book at your own pace, and click here for a fun and meaningful idea for Citizen Action lesson plan on immigration! Citizen Action lesson
- Remember to keep predicting/inferring and using those reading strategies throughout the book! Create class webs, and use think-pair-share activities throughout reading!
- Compare and Contrast the book events to events today.
- As the book starts to talk about Matti and his dad searching for land and mapping out their land, incorporate this Homestead lesson plan plus resources and additional ideas for more lesson plans! Homestead lesson Be sure to have students take notes of common problems and materials used when Matti and his father built their Homestead, they'll be used in the above lesson plan.
- Complete this activity either when the book is finished or halfway through as well. Have students draw pictures to help them remember chapters in the book or important sections! Pair students up and have them quiz each other on the sequence of the story, and give brief definitions regarding the important sections of the book by using their pictures. Picture Sheets (printable)
Suggestions to incorporate into this Social Studies unit:
- Incorporate a lesson(s) on mining relating it to the book, a day in the life of a miner. (see the resources page for helpful info)
- Problem/Resolution worksheet (printable) Use this throughout the book for students to write down problems the class identifies or individual, and predict and infer together or individually what will happen.
- Have students create storybirds about any of the topics throughout the book! This is a fabulous way to increase content knowledge, test content knowledge, and let students' expressions and creativity shine! It's easy to sign up and have students of all ages create and share! Link to storybird
- Resources, worksheets, and print outs to use! All teachers need these things at their fingertips! More graphic organizers!
- Click here for an end of book story summary sheet.
Have fun with this!
They're very important and interesting topics that students will enjoy learning about!
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