September Highlights

There is so much happening in our classroom this month!

US History students are learning about the work of historians through the Stanford History Education Group's "Thinking Like a Historian" series. This program is serving to add to our academic language in the classroom this year. We are also studying the pre-Revolution and the Revolutionary War. Our study centers around "March Madness"-style brackets. 

Student groups are analyzing people, places, ideas, and events of the time period through seeding and regional tournaments. The ranking necessary to complete these regionals isn't easy! Students develop their rankings and topics independently, then they need to prove to their group mates the importance between, for example, a three seed versus a six seed. The elimination rounds are full of animated voices and students scrambling to locate factual justifications in our materials and create an agreed-upon set of topics and a winner. The first two regionals are complete, we are now taking more time to learn about the war and will interpret excerpts from "Common Sense" and create a blackout poem with part of the Declaration of Independence--watch this space!

My Language Support-History class is so rewarding! These students are so eager to learn. We are studying maps and one of our highlights was going outside all hour last week to traverse the school property with a GPS unit, determining latitude and longitude coordinates around the campus. How fun!

I am amazed at how different teaching this class is compared to my US History class. It's not just different materials and all three Middle School grade levels at once, it's the nature of the class. The students are keeping me on my pedagogical toes and I really need to plan and structure with best practices in mind. Language Support students have little to no prior knowledge in our common language. I even got to practice my German today--not conversationally, but while teaching and re-teaching the concept of a map key. I need practice but, all in all, it went pretty well.

Onward!




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Historical Perspective and Peel the Fruit Thinking Routine

Image
Practicing historical perspective is an essential social studies skill. Historical perspective is being able to step into a historic situation and examine the motivations, biases, and beliefs of a person or group of people. Students have to revert to the beliefs of a group of people even if those beliefs completely contradict the views we have today. They must weigh decisions based on the situation of the time, not necessarily how situations are viewed today. The C3 Framework for Social Studies states that "Historical understanding requires recognizing this multiplicity of points of view in the past, which makes it important to seek out a range of sources on any historical question rather than simply use those that are easiest to find. It also requires recognizing that perspectives change over time, so that historical understanding requires developing a sense of empathy with people in the past whose perspectives might be very different from those of today." http://www.so
Read more

Name That Executive Role!

Image
Students today learned about the many roles of the head of the Executive Branch, the President of the United States. I found several images of former Presidents in these roles--can you guess which is which? Post your answers below or email them to me. Choices: Commander-In-Chief Chief Executive Political Party Head Chief Diplomat 1.  President Eisenhower 2. President George HW Bush (on the right side of the picture) 3. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt  4. President Reagan meeting with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (this one's a bit of a giveaway!)
Read more

Industrial Revolution Haiku

Students have been learning about the Industrial Revolution in the mid1800s and how it changed life in New England. Today students processed their learning by creating haiku poems on the subject. They were challenged to think about and evaluate this topic within the structure of a haiku, a 3 line poem with 17 total syllables--5 in the 1st and 3rd lines and 7 in the second line. The poems have been impressive and some will be posted here soon.
Read more