Week 7: Snowball Fight Mania! Social Studies Lesson Plan

•  By Amnah Hzaiyen
• Thursday, March 5, 2020

Today, I taught my social studies lesson plan on Cultural holidays in the United States. My goal for this week was to begin creating more fun and engaging lessons for my students. It was brought to my attention how I can create my lessons to assess what I am expecting of the students, but in a way that is more fun for the students and doesn’t seem so “boring” for them. My lesson was focusing on differences and similarities between different cultural holidays that we see in the United States. I was going to have the students do a Venn diagram for their independent practice, but had the students do a “snowball fight” activity instead. They threw paper snowballs with different sentences or words that describe both or one of two holidays then had to walk over to a designated sign for those two holidays. The students had a lot more fun with this activity than I had anticipated. At the end of the activity, the students had asked me multiple times to do it again, but unfortunately we had not time. I had a handful of students tell me how much fun my lesson was and that they would love to do it again. After teaching this lesson, it made me understand how important it is to create fun and engaging lessons. All the students were involved and participating, which is quite rare compared to what I usually see. I now understand the importance of creating these fun lessons, and understand that there are many websites out there with lots of different ideas I can use to create these lessons.