Contextualization ....through pictures

Full disclosure, I end a sentence in a preposition.  Mrs. Liviccio would have taken points off for  that in 1988.

Chris Scaturo ,

This is awesome! Thanks for the share. I'm throwing out my lesson planned for Thursday and using this instead! 

Are you having kids "research" what they need to find or know for context? What does that piece look like?

And yes, I love the weeping Frenchman activity. It hits perfectly and lends itself well to follow-up work.

Rob

Fantastic idea! I've been wondering if What's Going on in This Picture from the New York Times might be another way to reinforce contextualization using photos throughout the year. 

My class today looked a little like this:

Weeping French Guy- Intro 20 minutes

Picture Identification in groups- Had the kids try to figure out the answers in small groups (15 minutes, this is a little long IMO but my kids stayed on task)

Whole class review-   The kids knew, or were close, on most of them other than the Gandhi and Afgan Girl picture.  I fed the answers to my lower ability class, I made my higher class look them up and share.   (20 minutes)

The quote of the day was from my boy Curly, "I've seen all these pictures, I just don't know what they mean!".

 Chris Scaturo , love all of it, there are so many applications. I have used the Jacques Louis David painting of Napoleon's coronation to push this along as well in the same fashion as the picture book Zoom some of us have been talking about. I think it helps kids make the same sort of connections that you are drawing.

Curtis Greeley ,

You've got me thinking how we could keep this going with something like a See Think Wonder activity, perhaps making inferences on the context. I use the 3 images below as an intro to Napoleon:

That's a great win for this early on the West Coast, I'll try to string a couple of those together today!! Thanks for the feedback, Rob Valenti 

Very cool. Thank you for sharing. This looks like something my colleague Daniel Shapiro would appreciate. 

Some of my students may, depending on their cultural background, be able to identiify some of the context but I'm going to guess that on the whole they would struggle to contextualize the images. 

I'm wondering out loud...

- For the higher achieving kids - how did you have them look it up? Did you give them search terms? 

- For the lower ability class, I'm wondering if there's another way to get them to contextualize without just telling them what it is... or maybe they can make guesses about what's going on in the lesson just based on the image itself... 

I love this extension - thank you for sharing! 

That's a great quote from your student! Nothing like those little comments at the beginning of the year to lift your spirits. 

"For the higher achieving kids - how did you have them look it up? Did you give them search terms? "

They google searched the image.   I had each group do one and they became the experts.

"For the lower ability class, I'm wondering if there's another way to get them to contextualize without just telling them what it is... or maybe they can make guesses about what's going on in the lesson just based on the image itself... "

They did make guesses, I had them in groups of four try to infer the when and where based on clues from the pictures. 

Right on. Looking forward to trying this out!