Pear Deck

Pear Deck is a fantastic tool for making presentations more interactive. In this week's module, we made a Pear Deck slideshow to support the standard of learning (SOL) that we selected in Module 1. To teach my SOL for first graders about influential people in the history of Virginia (history and social science SOL 1.3), I made a slideshow about Maggie Lena Walker. 

My slideshow could be used in the classroom (if every child has a device) or in the remote setting. The objective of the lesson is for students to be able to describe the story of Maggie L. Walker and her contributions to Virginia. I included a visual thinking strategy exercise to kick off the lesson and engage the students. To make the content more interesting and accessible to first graders, I included interactive questions to help them relate their lives to Maggie's, such as how would you feel if you had to wash clothes every day, and how do you help your community? At the end of the presentation, I included a slide to formatively assess what students learned about Maggie Walker. 

In addition to teaching SOL 1.3, I also included a few slides to support SOL 1.1 - history and social science skills. I included several primary sources (photographs) to help students develop an understanding of Maggie's history. I included a timeline to help the students see that Maggie Walker lived at a different time from them, and from the other influential people in Virginia history. Finally, I included an interactive slide to help them practice the key content vocabulary word - contribution.