Advocacy Lesson!

 In this lesson, we taught about advocacy within Mexico! The first thing we did was have students take a pretest. This was a quick matching activity about different vocabulary students would learn in the upcoming lesson! Then we began introducing our tier 3 vocabulary to the students!

The vocab words were hidden by a piece of construction paper, and each student was able to come up with and reveal it! It discussed what advocacy and an advocate were. Then we discussed the vocabulary words justice and solution (tier 2 vocabulary) and explained how they related to advocates. The remaining vocabulary were cause, effect, and script! The first activity was a cause and effect card search. Students were given a cause or an effect and had to find their matching pair. For example, one student may have “Called the dog” and the matching card would be “A dog came over” (these cards had words and pictures. Then, once everyone found their pair they sat together and explained which was the cause and which was the effect. After that, we had a problem/solution activity, groups of students were given a different problem, such as “Someone keeps littering in your neighborhood and leaving trash everywhere!” and the pairs worked together to create a solution that prevents that problem from happening again! We shared our problems and solutions, then it was time for a brain break.

Here, students shook their arms if it was a cause that was read aloud or shook their legs if it was an effect that was read aloud. After that, we read our read aloud Funny Bones: Posada and His Day of the Dead Calaveras by Duncan Tonatiuh. This book discussed Posada, a Mexican advocate who drew political cartoons to share messages. Students then looked at primary sources of Posada's work and tried to analyze the meaning or problems that Posada was trying to illustrate. Most students came to an agreement that he was protesting violence within Mexico. After this we became our very own advocates. Students were given their very own Mexican advocate in an envelope with three short stories and pictures of their advocate. The advocates given to the students were chosen off of their interest, there was an Olympian for a boy in the group who played several sports, a Judge for a girl who explained how she wanted to become one during our civics lesson, and an astronaut for the student who had explained how she wanted to become an engineer when we discussed goods and services in our economics lesson. Their advocates were tailored to them! One student was not extremely excited to have Cesar Chavez, the farmer, until it was explained to him that he was one of the most famous Mexican advocates, then he was on board! Students first had to read their stories, and once they found facts, they would raise their hand, and we would ask them what they found. 

 Once they were able to list three to five facts about their advocate, they were given a script. Students did really well writing in the first person as if they were that advocate! After their script was finished they were given a plain T-Shirt and fabric markers to design their shirt to look like the advocate's clothes (like creating a costume!). Once everyone was done, we moved to the rug and shared who our advocates were with our group, the advocates would stand and read their script! 

After this we gave the students their post-test for all of our lessons. We finished by having our award ceremony where each student received a certificate for Mexico exploration. This may have been my favorite part of any lesson I have ever taught, the students were so proud of themselves and their groups. They were both really excited and trying to be nonchalant at the same time as everyone clapped for them. Then we handed out all of their artifacts that we had made from previous lessons and said goodbye!