Activities and Projects

Plan Learning Activities
Plan a variety of ways of presenting the history of the Conquest to students, including visuals of Spanish and Aztec warriors, stories of contact between the two groups, and possibly short documentaries to catch the attention of students with different learning styles. Always plan for extra time at the end of each lesson to answer any questions or misunderstandings about the Conquest. These questions should help the teacher to design the learning activities:
 * ·        What will I do to explain the Conquest to the class?


 * ·        What will I do to illustrate the Conquest in a way that my students will understand?


 * ·        How can I engage my students in the discussions about the Spanish and the Aztec


 * ·        What are some relevant real-life examples, analogies, or situations that can help students understand the implications and results of the Conquest?


 * ·         What will students need to do to help them understand the Conquest better?

Handout Ideas
For the students to learn better, it may help for the teacher to provide them with handouts to help them stay organized with the material of the Conquest. For instance, a physical fill-in-the-blank timeline may help students to study and is a great way for a teacher to check for understanding in their students. This can optionally be given as a grade, but it may be better to hand it out as an activity that the teacher will help fill in later on in the class. This can optionally be done as a workshop activity in which groups are supposed to fill in a certain section of their timeline at different stations in the class. This will help break the static learning, and make students move to get the information needed.

Maps are always a good handout when studying history, and may be a good idea for the teacher to handout to the students. A good method of this is to hand out a colorless and borderless map to students and have them outline the Aztec empire’s expanse, to draw out Cortes’ landing point, advance into Mexico, and the location of major cities that were involved in the Spanish Conquest.

Studying/Activities/Projects
For in-class studying, an activity in which students go up to a board and write out the answers to questions assigned to them by the teacher can help the student be peer reviewed rather than taught. This method helps in that the entire class can discuss and verify if the student’s answer is correct, building student’s confidence in their own knowledge and not relying too much on the teacher for everything.

A quiz game may also be set up with the class. If the class is broken into 4 or 5 teams, then they can each send someone up to the board to earn points based on if the team’s answer is correct or not. The team with the most points at the end of the game period can receive a prize, such as bonus points for their grade.

Another more hands on method of encouraging students to learn about Aztec culture is to assign a project on designing an Aztec warrior’s garb on a scale model. This may be done on a poster board, a computer, or a student may construct an actual costume.