Asia for Educators!

[Brigid Schmidt]

https://guides.library.duke.edu/K-12resourcesonEA

I chose a web resource from the Duke University Library site. This site had many resources for teachers to add East Asian themes and culture into their lessons. It also has resources for students as well. What I like about this website is that it breaks things down into easy categories finding lessons about China, Korea, Japan, or East Asian in general. You can click through the website and find actual lesson plans on Geography, Arts, Religion, and Language Arts (which is important for my classes.) There are even video lessons and lectures you can listen to for more information or to share with your classes. I also enjoy mixed media, because it reaches more types of learners. There are even projects you can do with your students. Our school likes project-based learning to add variety to traditional classroom settings, so this would be a useful tool for me. I find it helpful to look for guidance with projects and see how I can tweak them for my class. Learning successes and challenges other middle school/secondary teachers might have faced would be beneficial.

Additionally, there is a whole section on Buddhism, which my students are exposed to in 6th grade. I like the pictures and artifacts they offer to help visual learners. It shows Buddhism from Chinese, Japanese, and Korean perspectives-which would be insightful for students to understand that there is not only one approach. 

Another section I really loved was clicking the Language Arts section brings you to a list of books based on grade levels. They start from 3rd grade level all they way through 12th grade and are broken up my Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese novels. One of the more difficult things to do as a new middle school English teacher is to figure out novels for my students to read. This is a wonderful resource for books and I could even break the class up in reading groups to have them read a variety of books and then they could present them to the class. This would help with differentiating reading for the students. 

Lastly, the online Art Museum link is awesome! You can look at musical instruments, artwork from specific periods, and artwork from different religions or cultures. There is so much to explore. I think I could spend hours continuing to look through all of these sections. Overall, I think it is pretty user-friendly. As an educator, I mainly focused on the "Asia for Educators" section because there were so many great ideas and resources to work with. I guess the drawback is that there is quite a lot of information, so it could become overwhelming. I will definitely use this resource to help with my lesson planning though! 

[Author]

Posts