This lesson plan is an attempt to spice up an otherwise bland section of the textbook - Central and West African Kingdoms, circa 1450.  This section is intended to provide students with some background on what the world was like when Columbus sailed west and sparked the colonization of the Americas.

The lesson begins with a simple reading prompt.  It is an excerpt from Gomes Eanes de Zurara that I found interesting.  In discussing the discovery of Guinea, he describes Africa as being sparsely populated by nomadic peoples.  He makes no reference to the large kingdoms (Benin, Songhai, etc) or to Timbuktu. 

The students task, then, is to research African civilization at this time period and write a letter to the King of Portugal to convince him that de Zurara was wrong.

The lesson utilizes a website that allows teachers to create free webquests. You can check out the webquest I created (Kingdoms of West and Central Africa) and browse the main webquest site from there.  The excerpt from de Zurara that I mentioned above is included in the “Introduction” section of the webquest.

Once the students have read and thought the prompt, they divide themselves up into pairs or groups of three (depending on how many computers are available).  Each small group navigates to the webquest, reads through the “Task” and “Process,” and begins to peruse the resources.

Under Process, I included links to five useful websites.  They include much of the information that is in the textbook along with some pictures, diagrams, and other interesting tidbits.  I originally intended to include these resources in a del.icio.us list, but the old Macs we have at school won’t display the del.icio.us site properly.  Hopefully this site shows up correctly, or I’ll be in for trouble tomorrow.

The students have the bulk of the period (around 30 minutes) to use these resources.  If they finish, they can look elsewhere (Google, wikipeda, etc), but this should take them a while.  There are a few guiding questions to make sure that they write down some useful information.

Once they are done, the students should shut down their computers, compare notes with their partners, and prepare to write their letter.  As a recap, I’ll ask three or four students to tell me something they learned during the lesson.

The homework assignment is designed to do a couple of things.  First, it assesses the content knowledge they gained during the activity.  It also pushes them to utilize that content in an evaluative way - they are supposed to argue a point, and use their knowledge to convince someone that Africa was a center of civilization like Europe and Central America.  Finally, it provides them with an avenue to practice their written communication skills, something I like to do at least several times a week.

As for the website (instantprojects.org), I wasn’t too impressed.  I used it because it was a convenient place to store this one-day lesson.  However, there were a few things that discouraged me from going back.

You can only create one web quest per account.  I couldn’t store a collection of them here to be used throughout the year.  You can work around this by creating new accounts, but that’s a hassle.

There were some problems uploading images.  When I tried to add a header image to a page, it didn’t display the whole thing.  I had to work around this by linking in the page itself to an image I had uploaded to Photo Bucket.

There is also no easy way to navigate to the web quest from the front page.  You need to get the webquest manually approved as “Complete” before it enters the database for browsing.  It would be nice if there was a place on the front page to enter a teacher’s name or an ID number and jump straight to the webquest.  As it is, I’ll need to write the whole URL up on the board.

The site is ok and it’s worth checking out to experiment with webquests, but it could be better.  Perhaps that’s a project I’ll work on another day.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 16th, 2007 at 11:56 am and is filed under Lesson Plans, Resources, Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.