Title – American Revolutionary War PowerPoint Presentation

By – Michelle Anderson

Subject – Social Studies, Language Arts, Computers

Grade Level – 5th, 8th

Materials: Microsoft PowerPoint, reference materials for the Revolutionary War (this could easily be adapted to any unit of study), an overhead that a computer is hooked up to, a screen to project the slide shows, and a scanner is optional.

Objectives: Students will explore the American Revolutionary War by choosing main ideas from various sources (text book, Internet, etc) and demonstrate their knowledge of the war through creating a PowerPoint slide show.

Assessment: Create a rubric based upon what you are assessing for. For instance, students receive two separate grades: One for the chosen material for the slide show & one for appropriate use of PowerPoint (coordinated with the computer teacher).

Prior Knowledge: Before this unit can be assessed, students need to have researched their material, chosen their information for their slide show, and know how to use the PowerPoint program.

Lesson:

1. Discuss project, including rubric requirements.

2. Students research information from the Revolutionary war.

3. Mini-lessons on how to choose important information and noting sources used are taught before work on the slide show is begun.

4. After students have sketched out their plan for their slide show, begin constructing the show using PowerPoint (I have found this to take about 4 45-minute class periods, for good work). If students know how use a scanner, allow them to scan relevant pictures, or ask you to scan them and put them in a network folder.

5. Students present their slide show to the class (computer grade is assessed at that time. Students save their work to their network file or to a disk, and give to the teacher for rubric assessment.

*Thin about inviting parents or other teachers and/or classes to view the presentations! The students are always so proud of their work. They like it much better than “workbook” pages…and they learn more skills this way too!

Good Luck!

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Michelle Anderson

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