When "I Don't Know" Becomes a Starting Point
I've always wanted to give my students the opportunity to learn about our National Parks and try podcasting with my students. Combining these two options has been proven successful, and the perfect antidote to end of the year motivational struggles. I researched and found a terrific podcasting resource from Spark Creativity . The author is has a Language Arts background, but so many of her resources, from blackout poetry, to one pagers, to hexagonal thinking, are very adaptable to our History curriculum. We began this unit on the last day of school before Winter Break but shelved it to create National History Day projects. A few Fridays ago it became evident we all needed a change. I decided from the next Friday forward we would bring back the National Parks podcast project to end our week. We started (again) by viewing a "See All of the National Parks in One Minute" clip. This built some excitement and curiosity for selecting a park. The next step was to think of a po