Mrs. Slaviero's Blog

My Language Support Historians have been very busy in class these past few weeks. The start of the school year (especially this year) is all about assimilating to a new country, state, city, and school. We are building community and are now ready to roll! Last week and this week was spent diving into the five themes of geography and focusing on different regions of the United States. Groups selected two states from a particular region to study through the 5 themes lens.  I  introduced students to Noodle Tools, helped them create a project, showed them how to link their project to my teacher inbox, search our Media databases and e-books, select sources, cite those sources in Noodle Tools, and use those sources for research! It is affirming for all of us to see the momentum build as we dive deeply into 21st Century learning! The next step in our project is to practice speaking skills. I am learning how to even better support and scaffold work for these students and I created a c...

Student Historians have been very busy these past few weeks. We are spending our time on the three branches of government and on our National History Day projects. It's always rewarding to have students learn about how our government works and I've used two resources to help this year: the Constitution graphic novel we used last year and, thanks to my newest US History colleague's suggestion--an amazing website called iCivics  . iCivics is an engaging and interesting way to help students learn about the US Government and I would like to utilize it more next year. I'm also happy to see that the website covers more areas that we learn about this year.  NHD is going quite well. The payoff for students and me is manifesting itself on a daily basis--I'm getting to know 8th Graders that aren't in my classes and building connections with the grade level as a whole, helping students through the "just tell me the answer" phase of learning, encouraging ...

Teaching in the 21st Century never ceases to amaze me.  As stated in a post last year, I utilize Twitter in my classroom  through a classroom Twitter account several times a week. I find it to be an incredible way to allow parents and our community to witness the work that goes in my History and Study Skills classes and to showcase school events and the amazing young people I teach.  While posting a reminder about our school football teams' games on Wednesday a top hashtag caught my eye: #AskAnArchivist was trending.  I follow the United States National Archives   on Twitter and their latest post advertised an hour-long session in which a team of Archivists would answer questions tagged with this hashtag. I had less than 45 minutes before this window of opportunity closed. My third hour class took advantage of this teachable moment and it turned out so well! Student Historian groups came up with questions they hoped to receive answers for, ...

As my Student Historians prepare for their Capstone Portfolio interviews in May I have been reflecting on my second National History Day journey. Students are expected to have three pieces of work from each content area represented in their portfolio. Their NHD projects should take a prominent place in their History portfolio section for a multitude of reasons, most of which relate to the concepts in the 6 Cs of Education: Critical Thinking, Communication, Citizenship, Character Education, Creativity, and Collaboration. Critical Thinking This component is embedded in National History Day projects. Student Historians are expected to utilize higher-order thinking skills as they research topics they are interested in and break down the year's theme related to their topics. Students need to write a persuasive thesis, evaluate sources for reliability, use those sources to prove their thesis, and create a project within this Project-Based Learning model. They must be digital think...