Students Research Central American Countries

By Michelle Cohen

In my ESL/Bilingual class at Albert Einstein HS, I taught a unit on Central America over the course of one week. Each student contributed to a shared/collaborative slide presentation about each of the seven countries. I have eight students total so we added Peru. The original slide presentation is available through Slidesgo, and I selected and adapted which elements each person was to research.

To supplement the weeklong experience, I shared some personal Central American (and Peruvian) artifacts to examine on day one. For the remainder of the week I incorporated materials from the many resources provided by the Teaching Central America collection. I shared several biographies on day two. We read examples of Central American poetry on day three. We watched the short animated film, Prudencia Ayala. Students finalized research on day 4, then shared their presentations and ate pupusas on the final day. I provided access to the novel Solito via Soraapp. I created a video of our presentations and week long events.