As a fifth-grade Language Arts and Social Studies teacher, I encounter difficulties teaching my students to (1) make real-world connections to the text, (2) build their vocabularies, and (3) connect visualization to comprehension retention, especially if they are reading a historical text. This unit on the Revolutionary War helps my students connect the past to their present lives. This unit uses visual stimuli as the main tool to connect images to textual information. Portraits of people, places, and major events like
The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere
, are examples of the visual stimuli used to enhance the students' background knowledge and comprehension. In addition, maps are used to help students locate key battles and places. Information is presented using graphic organizers like the Venn diagram to help the students organize the material introduced to them at the start of every lesson. The culminating project will ask students to choose any mode of visual representation that they have learned about to devise a storyboard depicting one or more events of the Revolutionary War. The unit is designed for students in grades five to eight.
(Developed for Language Arts and Social Studies, grade 5; recommended for Language Arts and Social Studies, grades 5-8)