Lesson  Launch  

In They Snooze, You Lose:  The Educator’s Guide to Successful Presentations (2011), Lynell Burmark offers an array of practical suggestions to enhance your next presentation.  In the book’s formatting, Burmark clearly practices what she preaches!

This presentation guide is user friendly.  Each couple of pages of text are followed by a practical activity to involve the reader.  For example, open up one of your existing slide presentations and count the number of words on a typical slide or—better yet—count the words on each slide and divide them by the number of slides in the presentation (excluding the title slide). 

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Lecture:  a discourse [or a formal, organized talk] given before an audience or class especially for instruction.[1]

Notice:  The “L” word—lecture—is being banned from this blog!

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Often before 3 am, the whistles blew along the gulf coast, from the Florida Panhandle to Louisiana, summoning “piece-work” laborers—many of them children—to the damp and darkened drudgery of the shucking sheds.  The night’s harvest would arrive in the wee hours of the morning and then was offloaded from the fishing boats onto mini-train cars where the oysters were steamed before being shucked (opening the oyster shell and removing the oyster meat or bivalve) for canning. 

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“[S]tanding, reaching, prying and dropping—minute upon minute, hour upon hour, day upon day, month upon month.” 

This is how the renowned sociologist, photographer, and researcher, Lewis W. Hine described the plight of child workers, who toiled in seafood canneries on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast.

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The format of the game show, To Tell the Truth, can be utilized as a fun and engaging alternative to the traditional reading quiz, which is often given to assess whether students have read and understood a handout or passage in a textbook.

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The Andy Griffith Show (TAGS), set in the fictional town of Mayberry, North Carolina, was a beloved television show of the 1960s. It’s wholesome brand of humor, memorable ensemble of characters, and the wisdom, decency, and fatherly devotion of the lead—Sheriff Andy Taylor—made this comedy a favorite. In fact, it is one of the few shows that ended its television run (in 1968) at #1 in the Nielsen rankings.  The timeless themes of the show still appeal; even today, the reruns are watched by thousands of viewers.  Brief video clips from the TAGS episodes can also provide a humorous, entertaining, and interesting opening to your next US History class.

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The middle grades provide a perfect opportunity for students to experience the Law Game!

Just as young adolescents reach the age where they are beginning to question rules and challenge authority—all developmentally appropriate, within reason, mind you, students often study the emergence of ancient civilizations, such as Sumer, Babylonia, and Assyria, etcetera. 

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Begin (or end) your next class with a “Powerpoint Challenge”!  

Select a top ten list that is relevant to your subject area (e.g., the ten states with the most electoral votes for US Government, or the ten largest nations based on land size/territory for World Geography, or the ten nations with the highest per capita income for Economics, etc.).

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What do students anticipate when they walk into your classroom?

Are they excited with a sense of curiosity and adventure or are they detached and subdued automatons or—even worse—resistant, off task, and disruptive or insubordinate? The opening minute of a lesson often sets the tone for the remainder of the class period!

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Begin your next class by handing out a dollar bill to every student as they enter the classroom. Also, have posted on the screen a slide with this question: “How many thirteen’s can you find?”

Next, set a timer for three minutes and instruct students to list on a sheet of paper as many “thirteen’s” as they can find on the reverse side of the dollar bill?

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