Free Life On A California Mission Lesson Plan for 4th Grade Students

Topic: Life on a California Mission

Objectives & Outcomes

• Students will be able to describe the daily life of a person living on a California mission.

Materials

• Journal prompts or questions (e.g. What did you eat for breakfast? What was your job? etc.)
• Pen or pencil for each student
• Pages or paper to write on
• Mission model or pictures of a mission

Warm-Up

• Begin the lesson by showing the students a picture or model of a mission. Ask them what they notice about the picture or model.
• Next, ask the students if they have ever heard of California missions. Ask them to share what they know about them.

Direct Instruction

• Explain to the students that California missions were small settlements created by the Spanish in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
• Tell the students that the purpose of the missions was to convert Native Americans to Christianity and to establish a European presence in California.
• Ask the students if they can think of any questions they might have about life on a mission. Write their questions on the board and then answer them.
• For example, students might ask questions about what the buildings on a mission looked like, what kind of food the people ate, what kind of work they did, etc.

Guided Practice

• Distribute the journals to the students and have them each choose a person who would have lived on a California mission (e.g. a priest, a Native American, a Spanish soldier, etc.).
• Have the students write several entries from the point of view of their chosen person, with each entry covering a different aspect of life on a mission (e.g. food, work, religion, etc.).
• Ask the students to share their entries with the class and facilitate a class discussion on the different aspects of life on a mission that they wrote about.

Independent Practice

• Ask the students to continue writing entries from the point of view of their chosen person, with each entry covering a different aspect of life on a mission.
• Have the students collate their entries into a class book, where each entry is written in a different color ink (or pencil) to represent different -persons writing in their journals.
• As a class, go through the class book and have a class discussion on the different aspects of life on a mission that are written about.

Closure

• Ask the students to reflect on what they have learned about life on a mission.
• Ask the students to share any interesting or surprising things that they learned during the lesson.

Assessment

• Observe students during the guided and independent practice activities to assess their understanding of the topic.
• Review and evaluate the student's journals and class presentations for understanding of the material.