Station Rotation for A Christmas Carol Unit Part 1

I was inspired to try Station Rotations after reading a blogpost by Catlin Tucker. I had already tried stations with our Poe unit with some success, so I decided to try the idea again with our Dickens unit. I had found background materials for Dickens' story from a theatre that has been performing the play for over three decades. I decided to adapt the material into four different stations. I will describe each station below, along with my rationale.

The first station was a half-paper and half-tech station. I like to always mix up the stations so that the students are not using their Chromebooks at each station. This choice provides variety for the students and gives them a break from staring at a screen. This station was focused on the problems faced by big cities. The students read a brief description of London during Dickens time and then opened an envelope with six big city problems written on slips of paper. Students began by sorting the slips on their own from the most important problem facing a city to the least important problem. I wanted each student to think through this complex problem on their own before discussing it with others. After each student had sorted their list, they then tried to come to a group consensus about what the correct order should be. If the group could not come to a consensus about the entire list, they should at least agree on what should be the number one problem.

When creating the station I had to decide on the best way for students to collect what they had decided. I tossed around using a paper graphic organizer, a Google Doc, etc. I decided to use a Google Form so that students could rank the different city problems and which problem they felt was the greatest. The Google Form adds the advantage that when all students have completed the form I can create a visual of their choices. We can discuss as a class why certain rankings were more popular than others.

The final step in this station, and the final page of the Google Form, was to write a letter to Queen Victoria about how the group planned to address the problem. I created sentence frames for the students to use in their letter.

The students spent twenty-five minutes at this station. I was pleasantly surprised the wide variety of rankings that each group made and intrigued by the discussions they had with one another.

The next blog post will describe the second station students rotated through: What Do I Value Most?