I have to apologize for my lack of updates--it's been a busy two weeks! I promised to write a post about our "Impression Busting" activity and here it is...
When we started the Africa unit, I asked students to come up with impressions or stereotypes of Africa based on a handful of children's books we read in class. They did an awesome job with it, but I didn't want the activity to end there.
As a follow-up to our initial impressions, which ended up being very general, I wanted the students to "bust" their impressions after reading new information about Africa. Essentially, we were going to act like the investigators on the television show Mythbusters, except a lot less flashy! We even watched a Mythbusters clip about Africa to get in the mythbusting spirit.
I chose three impressions that the students came up with to focus on. As students read, they were to find information that made that impression true or false and record it under the "nuanced understandings" section of their charts. Finally, they decided if they could bust one of the impressions. If they could prove the impression wrong, they wrote "busted" underneath the impression.
Ultimately we decided that we couldn't say Africa was mostly desert or that Africa was always hot, but we thought that Africa did have a lot of different plants.
BUSTED!
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