Unit One: Why Study Africa?
Module Two: Learning About Africa - Explore
Teacher's Edition
(Explore Activities)
Activity One - Writing Exercise: "What do I know about Africa? What do I want to learn?"
(15 minutes)
"Please take out your Exploring Africa Web Journals, and think about the words you chose in our writing exercise at the beginning of class yesterday. Why did you choose those words? Why did you choose those images? Where have you seen or heard them before?"
Students are instructed to write answers in their journals for about 3 minutes. In a full class-discussion, teacher has students give answers, and categorizes them on board (option: as math skill-enhancer, items that are mentioned multiple times can be ticked for each time, showing the total number of occurrences in a frequency chart by the end).
Possible categories might be: News, Magazines, Books, Films, Family and Friends. If one of the categories has more entries than the others, the teacher should point this out. The point here is to locate the source of information of the students’ current knowledge of Africa and to discuss the consequences of getting information from these sources. For example, if the students get information from the news, the type of events that the news media (especially the international news media) covers should be discussed (e.g. major natural disasters, wars and calamities, etc.), and the types of events that are left out (stories of families and communities, coverage of important political and social events) should be brainstormed.
"What questions do you have about Africa?"
Students are instructed to write questions in their journals for about 3 minutes. Teachers should then hold a brief discussion. The teacher should write the main questions on the board. If there are questions that the main curriculum does not cover, please contact us for assistance.
Activity One, Exercise 2 then follows, with this transition: "Now that we know what we want to learn, let’s see if we can come up with answers to some of these questions on our own." The following handout exercise is provided to help with this endeavor.
Go on to Activity One, Exercise B or move directly to one of the other activities in this lesson plan:
- Writing Exercise: "What do I know about Africa, What do I want to learn?"
- Handout Exercise: Learning about Africa
- Handout One: Outline what you know
- Handout Two: Religions
- Handout Three: Identify Countries
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