When it comes to U.S. history lesson plans, what has worked in classrooms for the past 10 years might not necessarily work in the classrooms of right now. Kids these days have so many distractions, most of which stem from attention-grabbing technology that tends to make everything else--especially textbooks and lectures--seem pretty boring. If you think a textbook- guided discussion about politics and diplomacy during WWII is going to keep the technology-saturated minds of your 8th graders awake, you've got another thing coming. So, as the classic saying goes, "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." In other words, find World War II lesson plans that use multimedia sources to present the information in a way your students can appreciate.
Until two years ago, I was still relying heavily on the textbook (and the teacher's guide that accompanied it) for my U.S. history lesson plans. I like to think I'm a pretty good teacher, so I hate to think that my teaching was the reason why my students' grades were suffering. As it turned out, I decided to talk with my classes one day to ask them some questions and get a feel for the kind of teaching methods they liked. I also gave them surveys to get an idea of the different learning styles I was working with. The results I got blew me away--I can't believe I hadn't thought to do this before, because I had been going about teaching all wrong. Ultimately, I found out that they all loved me as a teacher, they just wanted me to present information in new and different ways. They all claimed to really enjoy group activities, games, and interactive, hands-on projects as opposed to textbook-aided lectures.
From that day forward, my classroom has been operating completely different. In any given class period, we might do three or four different activities--from listening to famous speeches and guessing who the speaker is, to re-enacting historical events, like the signing of the Declaration of Independence. When we're not split into groups, or interacting as one big group, I like to use PowerPoint presentations to get across important talking points that the students will need to know for quizzes and testing. They enjoy the PowerPoint slides because it gives them a visual and audible aid to accompany the information they're reading, writing, and hopefully absorbing.
When other teachers ask me where I get my Cold War lesson plans or my World War II lesson plans, I tell them that I use a number of different multimedia and interactive tools and activities to keep the kids engaged. Also, I tell them where they can find comprehensive U.S. history lesson plans in PowerPoint form. These come with not only the presentations, but worksheets, games, quizzes, charts, artwork, maps, and so much more. They are great to have, especially when you could use a little help during the more serious times in the classroom.
