Doodle 4 Google Lesson Plan 1

The South Africa of My Dreams: Imagine

In this first of three Doodle 4 Google lesson plans, help your learners explore their own dreams and ideas for a better South Africa. The activities are about finding inspiration from dreamers and doers in SA’s recent past, and imagining what the future could be like.

Visit the Google 4 Doodle website for all lesson plans and news about the competition.

SA curriculum compliance

This lesson plan can be incorporated into the following Life Skills topics:

Grade R

● My family ● Transport ● Jobs people do ● Healthy environment

Grade 1

● My family ● My community ● Manners and responsibilities

Grade 2

● Everyone is special ● Animals ● Transport ● People who help us ● Our country ● Ways we communicate

Grade 3

● Rights and responsibilities ● Public safety ● Pollution ● How people lived long ago

                                                                

Activity: It all starts with a little imagination!

This year’s Doodle 4 Google competition theme is: “The South Africa of my dreams”. At Google it has become a tradition to create doodles around the Google homepage logo to celebrate key personalities or moments in history. These Doodles are usually created by a Google team of artists. But as we celebrate 20 Years of Freedom in South Africa, Google is calling on school children to create a Google Doodle imagining their future for South Africa.

So let’s start with a little imagination!

Picture it

In this activity, learners view and discuss a variety of images that reflect life in South Africa. This serves as a stimulus to their own ideas for a what the “South Africa of their dreams” would look like. They generate these ideas through brainstorming and then choose one to use for their doodle idea.

Strategy

This activity uses the technique of brainstorming. The learners provide the ideas that are recorded by the teacher using an online collaborative tool, such as Google Drive. All ideas are recorded, with no comments made as they are offered, no matter how silly or unlikely the idea may seem. All learners are encouraged to participate and to build on the ideas of others to spark new ideas of their own. Learners then choose an idea from the ones generated.

You Will Need:

● A comfortable and collaborative environment to help to inspire young learners to brainstorm. Foundation Phase learners are likely to need your guidance during the brainstorming sessions.

● Access to the Internet. Although you can use this lesson plan with traditional offline tools such as clippings and whiteboards, we encourage schools with Internet access to experiment with digital tools. Some of the tools we will use include:

○ Google Image Search, which learners (in groups, or as a class with teacher guidance) can use to search for images. To make sure that learners do not come across any inappropriate images, turn on SafeSearch: go to Search Settings. Select the tick box to filter explicit results. (Learn more about making the web safe for children at www.google.co.za/safetycenter).

○ YouTube for inspiring videos - audio-visual is a very powerful tool for communicating ideas.

○ Google Drive - this is like Word or Powerpoint but hosted on the Web. Creating a Google Doc or Slide allows you to easily collaborate and re-share. If you’re using Google Apps for Education, you may already be familiar with this tool. But you can also use it by logging into your Gmail account and clicking on Drive.

● A laptop/PC and projector. A laptop/PC per group of learners is also a great way of bringing this lesson plan to life, as is an Interactive Whiteboard.

● Stopwatch/Timer (if you have a tablet, you will find a stopwatch in your Clock app).

                                                                

Teaching Guidelines

1. Find out if your learners know what a Google Doodle is. Show them some Google doodles online and explain that the doodles are changed regularly for special events or occasions. You can do this easily by typing “Google Doodles” into the search box on Google.co.za and clicking on “Images”.

Doodles are the fun, surprising changes that are made to the Google logo to celebrate holidays, anniversaries, and the lives of famous artists, pioneers, and scientists.

2. Try to get the learners excited about Google Doodles, and then tell them that they are going to get a chance to make their own in the Doodle 4 Google competition! The theme of the competition is “The South Africa of My Dreams” and learners must create a Google Doodle that fits with this theme.

3. Explain that the theme means “What you would like South Africa to be like?”. All South Africans have a responsibility to help shape our country, and even small acts (and small children!) can make a huge difference.

4. The first step is to start thinking about ideas that they could use for their Google Doodle. Explain how the activity will work to the class and make sure everyone understands what they need to do, and how they should behave (i.e. they need to be respectful to their classmates).

5. For the next step, you can use Google Drive to create either a Google Doc (like Word) or Google Slide (like Powerpoint) to record learners’ responses. (We recommend creating a Slide as it allows you to easily use more shapes and drawings). Ask the learners to call out words or phrases that describe life in South Africa for them, or things that they would find in South Africa, and type these into the presenetation. Use a stopwatch or timer to restrict this session to five minutes. Examples of words/phrases: “Nelson Mandela”; “sunshine”; “veldt”; “wild animals”.

                                                                

Google Slides make it easy to work together on a task, or to quickly jot down ideas

● Search for images using these keywords using Google Image Search. For example, one of the words may be “wildlife” or “animals” and there are beautiful images of South African animals in their natural habitat.

Use Google Image Search to quickly call up a variety of images linked to a word or term like “South African nature”

● You could also show some videos on YouTube for this part of the activity. For example, this is a video by South Africa Tourism highlighting the beauty of the country, or use this happy video using the music of Pharrell Williams to show South African people and culture.

                                                                

Showing a video like this “Happy South Africa” song on YouTube can be a good way of getting your class inspired about what makes their country a great place to live.

● Do not try to influence what words or phrases learners call out, unless they are struggling with the task. But it may be necessary from a timing point-of-view to only search for images for select keywords (try to limit this to about ten photos or videos). Try to present a variety of photograph types that covers different categories, such as: leaders, children, people who help us, environment, homes and animals.

● Insert the pictures into your Google Doc or Google Slide document, as the learners will need to look through them later. You can do this by right-clicking on the image and selecting “Copy Image”, then going to your document and selecting “Edit” from the menu, and then “Paste”.

● If your learners are capable (particularly in Grade 3), and you have access to the Internet for each group of four to six learners, let them do step 4 on their own and in their groups.

6. If your learners are not already in groups, divide them into groups of four to six learners. As a group, learners can talk about which photo/word/phrase they liked best and why. Give each group an opportunity to look through the photographs again on your laptop or PC and to choose, as a group, one image that makes them feel positive about South Africa. Ask them to think about:

● What they see in the photo (describe the photo) ● Why they think it is happening ● What they like about the photo ● How it makes them feel about South Africa.

                                                                

7. After the discussion, each group decides on one photograph to tell the class about. Representatives from each group then take turns to show the photograph to the class, describe what it shows, and explain what the group likes in the photo and what they think should change to make them like the photo better. In this way, learners are exposed to a variety of ideas about South Africa, as well as ideas about change, that they can draw on for the brainstorming session.

8. Explain that the class will now come up with ideas of their own that they can possibly use for a Doodle. Using Your Google Slide, display your screen and type the theme for this year’s Doodle 4 Google competition at the top: “The South Africa of my dreams”. Explain that this means that learners must imagine what they want South Africa to be like. If they could change anything to make their country better, what would it be? Explain that the class will brainstorm ideas that they could use for the competition.

9. If your learners have never done brainstorming before, explain it to them. Explain that everyone takes part to suggest as many answers or ideas as they can in a given time. All ideas are taken down and there are no wrong or bad answers. The goal is to come up with as many answers or ideas as possible. Explain that we can use the ideas of others to come up with new ones of our own.

10. Create a bubble in your Google Slide by selecting “Insert” on the Menu, then “Shapes” and “Callouts”. Write the following prompt in a bubble of your choosing: “South Africa would be great if …”. (This prompt is a paraphrase of the competition’s theme, as younger learners may find it easier to generate endings to this prompt.)

You can use shapes and callouts in your Google Slide to facilitate your brainstorming.

                                                                

11. Ask learners to suggest as many answers as they can think of to complete this sentence. Write down each suggestion around the bubble. Try to loosely organise the ideas as you record, by grouping together ideas on similar topics. Use drawings or symbols if they help you to record the ideas more easily. If learners get stuck and struggle to produced enough ideas, encourage them to use the ideas of others, or to think back to the photographs they have seen of South Africa or stories they have heard, to help them think of more ideas.

12. At the end of the brainstorming session, allow learners to sit quietly for 15 to 20 minutes to draw the South Africa of their dreams. If your learners have tablets, you can also use the collaborative whiteboard app SyncSpace for this part of the activity. These drawings and documents can be sent to you.

Take It Digital! More information about the apps in this lesson plan

● Google for Education is a collection of Google tools and products that make learning fun, productive and collaborative.

● Google Drive brings your documents to life with smart editing and styling tools to help you easily format text and paragraphs.

● Bubbl.us is a simple and free web application that lets students brainstorm online by creating mind maps. To view examples, learn how to use bubbl.us or simply start brainstorming, go to their website.

● Popplet: Used as a mind-map, Popplet helps students think and learn visually. Students can capture facts, thoughts, and images and learn to create relationships between them. For a tutorial on Popplet, watch this video.

● SyncSpace is a collaborative whiteboard app available for tablets. Students can use SyncSpace to create drawings and documents on tablets. They can create using free-hand drawing tools, using typing tools, or a combination of the two tool sets. Drawings and documents can be sent to and synced with other users so that they can comment and edit.