This is a thread for any lesson material for Middle School English 3 Special Lesson: What's in a Name?: U.S. Place Names.  Please share your contributions here~!

Hey...
I just did this lesson as my open class.  We kind of just used the idea from the book and expanded in our own direction.  Pretty much is was about 25 minutes of lecture.  Then we used the conversation, which you will have to prepare.  We printed them out, cut them up, mixed them up and gave each conversation to a group.  They had to put the conversations in order.  You could do this 6 different times if you like, just rotating the conversations around until each team does each conversation but we only rotated them twice and then had each group prepare and present their conversation to the class.  It was pretty interesting and informative.  You could easily attach it to the conversations in the book if you like. 

I hope you can use it!   

ok..... i'm hitting my head against a wall for this lesson. it's the last lesson in the book, so i'm trying to stretch it out as far as i can to avoid seven weeks of improvising my lessons/scrambling to find good materials. since there are pretty much no listening/speaking points to teach, what are you guys doing?! i saw the two lessons above me, and thank you!

Hi Rookiewaygook....
I don't know if it's just my crap school computer or if there's a problem with the file, but for some reason I can't seem to be able to download your pokemon ppt! I really would like to use it because my kids go apesh*t over pokemon, and I also am at a loss as to what else to do with them.
Any ideas? When I click on the link to download it, it just comes up as "index.php" and only registers as 1.1mb. Just wondering if you've ever come across this before....
Cheers

RookieWayGook - YOU ARE THE MAN!! Thanks heaps for the Pokemon idea. I modified it a bit, but it went down really well with my third graders.

THANK YOU!! 

Hi guys.

Thanks for the initial idea. I redid the presentation and added a quiz to the end of it. Note: the presentation is very picture intensive. Also, the transitions work best with Microsoft Office 2010.

-Sam

Hey...
I just did this lesson as my open class.  We kind of just used the idea from the book and expanded in our own direction.

From your PPT:
"North and South America were discovered in 1492 by Christopher Columbus.
Of course, there were people already living in America (Native Americans) but they were not civilized."

Are you Serious?!?!!?  OK, I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this is a result of a very poor education from some small town in Tennessee or something, not totally your fault, so to help you and others move forward:  This is 1) Just plain wrong and 2) Racist.  Not borderline racist, straight up racist.

I don't even know where to begin....Let's just say that the idea that only European culture qualifies as "civilized", and therefore all other cultures are lesser and should be happy to get some of the White people awesomeness is RACIST.  OK? 

The Native Americans had an incredibly complex and civilized society/societies.  So did Africans.  European culture was, by comparison, more violent and cruel and less open to diversity than than Native American Culture at that time.  One might argue that Europeans were in fact less civilized.

Please broaden your knowledge and perspectives.

Peace.

Here's my lesson.

It shows various places in the US, and the students have to guess the etymology of the names. It's made into a "game" with points. There is a small part in the beginning about counting large numbers as well.

I was worried about it being too difficult, but some of the students actually figured out some of the more difficult etymologies.

The ppt portrays Europeans as monocle wearing aristocrats and people from Georgia as gator hunting swamp dwellers. Also, you may want to remove the photo of me from slide 14.

I have a question about Pokemon? Are the names the same in Korean as they are in English? Because if not then the Pokemon names lesson will be a disaster. I know that Dragonball names are different in the two languages (Goku is Sadaku or something weird). Anybody know?