Elem Social Studies 17 (Tonya)

During our 4th class, I really enjoyed the timeline exercise where we took various documents related to Dr. Stohr’s dad’s life and tried to put them in order and see how they connected with the historical events of the time. I think the students would really enjoy this type of exercise as well, and I think that it would draw some reluctant learners into the lesson with some high interest items and the chance to discuss in a small group with peers prior to discussing as a whole class. I also loved the Antiques Roadshow: Show and Tell video. I think kids would really get into this kind of assignment. I thought it was so neat to see the necklace beads that the student had with an old picture of his grandmother wearing the same beads as a child. What a neat way to teach students about history and things of the past at a young age! My children are 10 and 13 years old, and this has me thinking about activities they could do with their paternal grandfather that served in Vietnam. Now, I am curious to ask him and find out what types of primary source documents that he had from the war that he could share with me, the kids, and possibly a future classroom.

Our classes, textbook, and readings/videos have been very helpful, but I still have various questions circling in my mind:

1. Do most schools have many primary documents available for use at the school or do teachers generally collect these on their own for their lesson plans?
2. Is it pretty easy to find instructional aids for primary and secondary sources to guide the teacher in interpreting more complex primary documents (Ex: political cartoons, symbolism in paintings)? I think I could usually interpret them on my own, but it would be nice to check and make sure that I am not misinterpreting or missing any key points.
3. Are most schools supportive of using historical fiction, as in our class literature circles, in our guided reading groups for upper elementary? Do parents ever complain that this type of content is too mature for an elementary reader? It is very helpful to start with the books that we are doing in our class as recommended historical fiction choices. My son also read and enjoyed Making Bombs for Hitler in his 5^th grade class. Do you have a list of recommended upper elementary historical fiction books that you could share?
4. How do you find balance between use of social studies textbooks, primary and secondary documents and historical fiction novels? Is there an ideal breakdown of how much time should be dedicated to each?

 

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.

From this week’s literacy lesson, a point that really stood out to me is the importance of front-loading lessons with a few key vocabulary terms or themes. Front-loading lessons, using a variety of tools (Ex: Frayer model, alphaboxes, words in context, etc.) to get students really engaged in thinking about those terms, allows students to activate their prior knowledge and make personal connections. In turn, this allows students to better understand and more actively participate in the instruction of the guts of the lesson. Because of our class example of comparing and contrasting revolution and reaction, I personally felt more interested in the following non-fiction reading regarding the Boston Tea Party. The quick write and gallery walk with images made me think more deeply about the words “revolution” and “reaction” than I had in the past, and it was a great warm-up for the rest of the class. I think young students would feel this way as well. Also, not only would they be more interested in the activity that follows, but the teacher would get a good gauge early on of what students already know and which students need additional encouragement and guidance throughout the lesson. I agree that neither copying dictionary definitions nor writing sentences (with likely incorrect usages) for vocabulary words is a good use of time. It is much more useful to have students learn the words in the context that is needed for the related lesson.  My favorite graphic organizer that we used in class was the one that was the most personal and said, “I will remember this word by connecting it to…”

The readings from this week reminded me of many of the non-fiction comprehension strategies that we have studied in Reading 1 and Reading 2, and just as Lisa said, many of the literacy strategies that we discussed in class are very well aligned with the reading SOLs, so it was great to see how easy it should be to integrate social studies material into our reading comprehension lessons. Also, the idea of comparing and contrasting content vocabulary words (like revolution and reaction) reminded me of what we are currently studying in Diverse Learners about ways that teachers can encourage students to move through the cognitive stages of development by presenting counterexamples and pointing out inconsistencies to help create a cognitive conflict for the student to drive deeper understanding.

The main idea that I learned during our first class is that social studies content should be made meaningful to students. Professor Bland’s description of why she loved social studies really stood out to me; Professor Bland explained that, with every conflict or event that has occurred across history, she has always enjoyed looking for the cause and effect relationship. Professor Bland also shared that People magazine is one of her guilty pleasures for very much the same reason – she likes to contemplate why people do the things that they do and how events lead up to final outcomes. Professor Bland’s perspective resonated with me. It seems intuitive that conflicts and events in history are the result of contributing factors, and it seems much more interesting to think of history in this way, but I don’t remember being taught this way in school. I think I would have enjoyed learning history much more and would be able to recall a lot more if cause and effect relationships played a larger role in the instruction that I received. I think most students would find history a lot more interesting if, rather than memorizing dates or events, they could imagine themselves in that same set of circumstances and imagine how they would react from multiple viewpoints.

I think that my earlier courses on instruction/assessment in math, science, and reading have prepared me well to understand the different components of a lesson plan and a unit (Ex: introduction/hook, objectives, learning targets, instruction, differentiation, formative assessment, closure, summative assessment, etc.), so although keeping in mind how to write strong lesson plans remains important, my main goal in this course is to develop a renewed appreciation for social studies and history and to learn how to share that enthusiasm with students through authentic experiences. My goal for myself is to reexamine the history that I learned and be able to understand the cause and effect relationships of events throughout history and be able to apply that knowledge to lessons that I create.

In order to achieve the goal of refreshing my social studies knowledge, deepening my understanding through examination of cause-effect relationships, and applying this knowledge to my planned instructional activities, there are certain elements that are key for me to get from this course contents and from the instructors. First, I need to figure out the best strategy to effectively and efficiently relearn and deepen my knowledge of the history that I will be teaching. I would love to find out if there are certain resources that are particularly helpful in meeting this goal. Second, I would like to learn some “go to” social studies instructional activities and teaching strategies that are best suited to help students make events that happened, often hundreds of years ago, meaningful to them. I would love to learn what instructional techniques have typically had the highest interest level with students and have produced the best results in applying the knowledge to other situations. Third, through my reading courses, I have learned a little bit about how much improved the non-fiction social studies resources today are compared to those of the past. In this course, I would like to learn more about which non-fiction series are best and which technology resources are best to use for social studies instruction and for projects or performance assessments.

NOTE: I loved the snowball activity that we did at the end of class to review key takeaways, and I would love to use this activity with students in my classroom. I think it is a really fun way to gauge what students learned from the lesson. I think if a variety of activities such as this or other exit tickets are used, students would infer that you are going to check to see what they gained from each lesson. As a result, they will be more likely to be actively engaged in each lesson.