Fifth-grade students at Hardy Oak Elementary School explored the RMS Titanic in their own classroom. This engaging, hands-on “Save the Titanic” lesson combined history with reading skills like text structure, non-fiction text and inferencing. Teachers Heather Kelley and Allison Cares recreated the interior of the ship’s dining room to include menus, tablecloths and a fine dining table setting.
“We chose to decorate the inside of the room like the dining rooms of all three social classes so we could show them a visual comparison which goes along with text structure,” said Kelley. “We chose a Titanic theme because it is a high-interest topic and we knew that all of our students would be motivated to complete the puzzles, especially since the objectives are the hardest for our students to grasp.”
Students visited a Google classroom website for an introduction video explaining their mission aboard the RMS Titanic. Over the next hour, they were challenged to complete five different puzzles with locks in a breakout room, with three on paper and two on the computer.
“We differentiated by giving some of the groups the knowledge of all the types of locks they were solving,” said Kelley. “Some groups knew three of the types of locks they were solving and some of the groups did not know any of them.”
The revamped Titanic classroom was up and running for several days and immersed dozens of Hardy Oak students in a creative, innovative learning environment.
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