The deep-dive analysis of primary sources activity that we did in class is definitely a lesson that I would like to use in my future classroom. I really enjoyed how the activity helps students to generate their own thoughts and ideas and to question things. I think students would really like acting as the detective or investigator to use these primary documents to figure out what really happened. I think it increases student engagement and participation when they have this goal of reading not just for meaning but to make a claim. There are so many key skills that are practiced in this type of activity: predicting, inferring, summarizing, synthesizing, comparing/contrasting primary sources, etc. Not only does this activity help the students to better comprehend and understand history, it also will help students to question things and perform higher-order thinking in their other subjects. I wish I had been taught in school in the way that we are learning to teach others – to think like a mathematician, a scientist, or in the case of this class, like a historian. I think it creates the mindset that the students play a much more active role in their own learning and prepares them for future careers versus the teaching of the past that I had where the teacher is the lecturer and you simply accept the textbook as fact.
Teaching Social Studies Today is a great tool for social studies teachers, and I think that I will refer back to it often. I love the guiding questions dispersed throughout the textbook that can be used as great starter question lists to introduce the various strategies and activities in the classroom. The suggested map activities in the textbook sound like activities students would love – using magnifying glasses to find interesting features and using historical maps to determine what their battle plan would be. The book has a wealth of useful resources (useful websites, reference books) listed that I will definitely reference in the future.