Learning history by imagining

Tara Smith at A Teaching Life has begun a new meme, Social Studies Wednesdays, which can connect to all teachers.    This summer, think about connecting with us and sharing what social studies lessons you use or want to use that also includes language skills like writing or public speaking, certainly research, and especially from first person accounts.  It's challenging and fun to connect.

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     One of the important lessons in history is to use a good imagination.  One must imagine things from the written word, even though others have created movies as their vision of historical persons and events, and one can view those, too.  Even with the visual, we still must use our own creative minds to try to see the past for ourselves.

Learning History by Talking

Tara Smith at A Teaching Life has begun a new meme, Social Studies Wednesdays, which can connect to all teachers. Please join her by posting your blog with ideas of work with students.  

Wouldn't it be great to have interviewed this woman?

             Sometimes people ask me what are my favorite assignments and I'd like to tell you briefly about one.  As the years pass, older people leave us, and I believe we educators are missing opportunities for students to meet elders to discover their lives when they were young.  Beginning experiences in interviewing help students' confidence, so the very first day, an assignment is to interview a classmate for the class scrapbook.  This scrapbook is a record, a history of this year's class.  There is a group that is in charge of creating the actual book's design, but everyone has a chance to add to it.  By pairing up students for interviews on the first day, they have the opportunity to meet a classmate they might not know so well, a good first step in talking with someone 'almost' new.

Past, Present, Future

Tara Smith at A Teaching Life has begun a new meme, Social Studies Wednesdays, which touches all kinds of teachers.  In some way or another, we all teach some social studies in our classes.  Please join her by posting your blog with ideas of work with students.  


Learn from the past, prepare for the future, live in the present.”
― Thomas S. Monson

        When I taught in a middle-school classroom, I had the privilege of writing curriculum often because my students each studied an individual unit topic, which, with their input, comprised the majority of their learning during the year.  It may seem like a big challenge if you’re only used to writing class units of study, but once you get into the rhythm of it, it goes well, and our school has a multitude of resources from which to draw when needed. 

The Next Step To Place

       Tara Smith at A Teaching Life has begun a new meme, Social Studies Wednesdays, which touches so many kinds of teachers in their curriculum.  In some way or another, we all teach some social studies in our classes.  Please join her by posting your blog with ideas of work with students.  
       Last week I started talking about the beginning of studying place in the area of social studies.  I told how I usually began with the connections of personal places at home with a writing and art project.  

What Does Place Mean To You?

Tara Smith at A Teaching Life is starting a new meme, Social Studies Wednesdays, which can touch so many kinds of teachers.  In some way or another, we all teach some social studies in our classes.  Please join her by posting your blog with ideas of work with students.  

       How hard it is to escape from places.  However carefully one goes they hold you - you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences - like rags and shreds of your very life.  ~Katherine Mansfield


When I taught my middle school classroom of mixed 6th, 7th and 8th graders, we spent a great deal of time exploring the sense of place.  This includes characteristics that are unique to that place, involving what humans have brought, their local knowledge and folklore.  It is important for humans to identify oneself in relation to a particular place on Earth.   

A New Meme To Celebrate!

SOCIAL STUDIES WEDNESDAYS!

Tara Smith who writes the blog A Teaching Life is inviting any blogger who wishes to link up to a new meme, SOCIAL STUDIES WEDNESDAYS, for teachers of different areas of social studies to share ideas from their teaching or other resources discovered.  I am happy to join her and share some of the ideas I've used in the past and those the teachers with whom I work are discussing.  I am the school's literacy coach and try to incorporate literacy into every area of the school through sharing ideas and discussions of what's currently happening with a group, a class or an individual student.

Social Studies is defined by the online Merriam-Webster Dictionary as a part of a school or college curriculum concerned with the study of social relationships and the functioning of society and usually made up of courses in history, government, economics, civics, sociology, geography, and anthropology.  It's a big subject!  I also found at that site that the first known use of the term social studies happened in 1926.  Obviously, it encompasses such a wide area and I know that many schools focus grade by grade on a set curriculum, yet within each curriculum study there is a wealth of possibilities. I imagine that what Tara is hoping is that we will share those possibilities.

In my thinking for this new challenge, I thought I would begin with a basic topic/theory I have often taught to students, or have had a student research it herself when appropriate.  You may already know about it, and I think it's probably most appropriate for about 10 years and up.  It is a theory of Abraham Maslow, a psychologist, named Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.  Essentially it is the idea that people need to fulfill certain basic needs in order to move to another level.  I have used this when studying the motivation for cruelty in the world, for theft, for heinous acts like slavery and the Holocaust.  It seems important to me that children learn some reasons for people's acts, to try to figure out their world.
Even young children can benefit from a conversation about the differences between "wants" and "needs".

The chart found in the link above, or in numerous graphics on Google images is endlessly interesting to students, and helps them to find out more about themselves, too.