Implementation of ‘The Life and Work of Charles Darwin’ (SOI-MT-84)

This session was conducted with a level 5 class which means, that it was tailored for the age group 9-10 years old. As one may read, the session explores the journey of Charles Darwin through a historical context. I had to alter it to a science lesson mixed with history.

True or false? Charles Darwin’s discoveries

Before implementing the concept of this Lesson Plan, the students were given a group task. I handed them the true and false statements provided in the LS and asked them to determine if they were actually true or false. I used this then as the introduction to Charles Darwin’s discoveries about adaptive radiation.

Prior to doing such a session, make sure to adapt the material found on the Europeana portal to your class. For me, I used the pictures present in the book as a basis of discussion and supplemented this with other imagery to highly biodiversity in the Galapagos Islands. It is a very versatile learning scenario once you are familiar with Charles Darwin’s work.

For example the book experts suggested provide a lot of learning resources. They could be used in an English lesson, Art lesson or History lesson. In my case, I adapted them to a Science lesson where one of the main learning objectives was observational skills.

I thought about incorporating the text as well, but for my level, it would have been too difficult for my students to understand. Still, there are some excerpts that could be used if manipulated well.

Adapting the initial learning scenario

The adaptations should also reflect the amount of time is devout to that activity. For example, I used the LS main activity as my starting activity and it took me a solid 10 minutes for all presentations to be done (proving why the statements were false or true). The observation skills then took me 30 minutes to do and lead me to an easy concluding activity of 10 minutes.

This time was more than enough to achieve my prescribed learning objective.

I found it very refreshing when one of my students suggested that on the day he learnt that old documents can still be used today. For him, they proved to be a source of inspiration for an art project.

Though at first, it wasn’t easy to find what I wanted, I ended exploring the vast array of items that the website has to offer. Pity that most of the material on the website cannot be used in class but you can still draw inspiration from them and use that creativity to build your lessons.

I especially liked seeing how other educators used the resources and made them their own. This inspired me to do the same.

Did you find this story of implementation interesting? Why don’t you read about the related learning scenario?

The Life and Work of Charles Darwin, created by Daniela Dorčak

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The featured image used to illustrate this article has been found on Europeana Collections and belongs to the public domain.