Communicable Puzzles: Children’s Most Common Infectious Diseases

By Karine Guay, Champlain Regional College

At a Glance

Discipline

  • Health science

Instructional Level

  • College & CEGEP

Course

  • 180-401-LA Care of the Childbearing-Childrearing Family

Tasks in Workflow

Social Plane(s)

  • Group

Type of Tasks

  • Collecting & seeking information
  • Discussing
  • Presenting

Technical Details

Useful Technologies

  • Teams

Class size

  • Small (20-49)

Time

  • Single class period (< 90 mins)

Instructional Purpose

  • Application & knowledge building

Overview

The goal of this activity is to encourage students to become self-directed learners and to encourage them to actively participate. The students learn to research information on their own from a reliable source and must participate actively since they will be presenting to another group once the research aspect is completed, which are 2 skills they need to develop as future nurses. The students are divided in 5 groups, each one is assigned to one communicable disease. they complete a table created by teacher and then present to other students with a different disease. The activity takes place in the classroom over a 3 hour block.

Instructional Objectives

  • Students will distinguish common childhood communicable illnesses (varicella, measles, fifth disease, rubella, hand-foot-mouth).
  • Students will explain the nursing management for these diseases (assessment and interventions)
  • Students will identify pros and cons of vaccination in prevention of these diseases.

Workflow & Materials

Workflow

Activity Workflow

View on CourseFlow
Document

Student Workbook

Karine Guay

Contributor's Notes

Benefits
Challenges
Tips
Benefits
  • Gives students a structure for research to use in the future (table).
  • Students practice self-directed learning
  • Gives students ownership of learning and increases awareness by having them present to others.
Challenges
  • We allowed students to change working room and since we did not see them, one group did not respect the number of students (5). Could be prevented by keeping all students in one classroom or by asking them to fill in a document with the students in their group before changing classroom
  • Some (most) student presentations were brief and may not have covered the key elements. They had to fill in a document that was shared with all the groups
Tips

Teacher should keep an eye on student work, making sure all key elements are in the table and avoiding wrong information since the topics are part of a test. Like in the example, this is a formative activity, it is done at the end of the semester and students are relieved that it is not graded while being aware it will be tested.

Applied Strategies

Jigsaw

Distributed expertise and knowledge sharing