Week 5 lesson and reaction

I am pretty sure that the only people that read my blog are the people that have to do it for my class, so if you don't understand what I am talking about you have stumbled across my blog by accident and I am sorry.
My lesson went well.  I liked the topic and the kids were great, considering that it was in the mid 80's in my room at the time of the lesson.  I wonder what everyone did to gather up a group of kids in the middle of the summer?  I was lucky enough to just kidnap a section of the summer school kids and get after it.

My only complaint is with the template that we had to use for the lesson plan.  I know that each one of the 6 sections are very important, however, it is not a real world template.  I mean no disrespect.  It is actually a nice template if I only taught one class a week.  It is very informative and leaves nothing to the imagination.  However, after teaching for 10+ years, it is just too wordy and lengthy.  Please give me some feedback on this.  I hope that our instructor doesn't put a hit out on me for voicing this:) but some others must have an opinion that could agree or disagree with mine.  Again, I do not mean to be disrespectful, it is just that after a few years teaching my lesson plans consist of a couple pages of notes and possibly a few references to a text or website.  Speak to me out there folks.  What have you got?
C. Gray

Natural Disasters as Teachable Moments

One of my goals as a middle school teacher is to help the kids understand empathy.  This is a very difficult thing to do with 12 and 13 year old kids.  It is normal for kids of that age to think about themselves and only themselves.  It isn’t because they are selfish, it is just where the kids are developmentally.  

Last year the world suffered a horrible disaster when Japan was hit with a large earthquake just off of their coastline.  This earthquake led to a horrible tsunami, which caused massive amounts of damage and casualties.  The most severe issues were with the damaged nuclear power plants that leaked harmful radiation that could affect people for generations to come.  

This, of course was an ideal time to teach kids about a tsunami, talk about the affects, and bring empathy into play all at once.  I did this with the use of technology.  Not surprisingly the media was all over the disaster and we were able to actually watch some live footage in class with kids.  At first they thought that the waves that were coming in were cool, and they talked about how fun it would be to float down the streets on inflatable tubes and play in the water.  Then as cameras rolled and showed cars being smashed into peoples homes and entire areas being destroyed it became very quiet.  The kids realized how big of an issue this was as it got more and more serious.  We discussed it as a class, and showed them some youtube videos.  The kids came up with the idea of collecting change and sending it to Japan to help with the people that lost their homes.  We made up some signs and collected some jugs for change and set up a table in the lunch room.  Kids were extremely generous.  In just a few days we were able to raise around 200 dollars.  Then the student council matched our efforts.  We researched a few charities that were set up for this specific cause and donated to the one we liked the best.  The money that we raised probably didn’t make a huge difference in the effort, but it was a huge step in making the kids think about others before themselves.