When looking back on my elementary school social studies I don’t remember much from this time. The lessons I remembered the most was learning about Lewis and Clark, creating a PowerPoint on a current issue (a list that was compiled from the class), Native Americans, pioneers, and creating trifold boards on a state mine was Florida and a year later doing one on a country I did it on Italy. I feel like in elementary school we focused a lot on the geography aspects of social studies rather than covering the history portion that didn’t come until junior high when we went more in-depth. There were times when we would cover history; it was usually when we were reading and it would relate to the topic, but we never had set lessons for it.
For elementary social studies I think it is important for the lesson to be structured and with multiple exposures that is why I remembered Lewis and Clark the most. Each part of the expedition was broken down into a reading we do as a class. During these readings we would also do other activities that were related to the reading. When I had to create something for a lesson it helped me remember more because of the effort I put into the lesson. Our school had a fair for our state and country trifolds, so the entire school would stop by throughout the day and look at all of the boards. So, as students we would want our boards to look the best. Some people would put artifacts by their boards from that place and little papers with designs on them.
Social Studies inquiry is about seeing what the students know and their prior knowledge of a topic and building upon it. This is a great way to see that students are naturally interested in and how it might be related to what is being discussed. A great example of social studies inquiry would be the PowerPoint on a current issue, because the students created the entire by adding two of their own ideas. Then we got to choose what topic we wanted to do a PowerPoint on. For the PowerPoint we did our own research and then we would present that information later to the class.
I love that you would do some reading on a subject and then did a project or some sort of activity to go along with what you had learned. I also remember doing that in grade school and middle school, and the lessons that we had an activity for are by far the ones that I remember the most. I think that it is super important to look back at our past experiences and think about the lessons that stuck out to us the most and why we think they stuck out. We can then learn from those lessons and try to bring those ideas into our own classrooms.
ReplyDeleteYes, when reflecting back those lessons are certainly the ones that are memorable. As a future teacher I think it is important to reflect back on our own experiences and see what worked and didn't work for ourselves.
DeleteMary,
ReplyDeleteDon't worry, you seem to remember a lot more about your social studies experiences than I do. I think I only remember doing around 3 maybe 4 lessons and they weren't as cool as some of your examples. I like that you shared the experience with the fair contest. This is something that I think should be used more, friendly competition in schools such as this to give students motivation to work hard on a project. I think that power point is a good way to help students get more familiar with presenting and I like the idea that your class did. Do you think that having things like the fair competition you talked about would be possible to do more often and possibly for larger projects? Maybe you could have a business nearby sponsor the competition?
I think what helped my school the most was that most of the teachers in the same grade level participated in the same projects like the state fair, country fair, or science fair. So students would be able to see everyone else's projects and younger students would be able to to look forward to do these projects in the future. It wasn't much of a competition, but just an opportunity to look at other people's work. However, for our science fair some students were selected to be a part of Washington State fair and present their projects in front of judges and got a ribbon.
DeleteMary,
ReplyDeleteI also agree that having more of a project or activity to do along with the lesson defiantly helps students engage in the lesson and retain the information better. I really like how your school did a fair and all the students got to go around and learn about the other places. That seems like a super fun activity for the kids and something I would love to do as a teacher in the future.
The fairs were definitely something I remembered the most, especially because the years prior I saw my sister and her friends do the same thing and it made me excited to do the same thing. I think having other teachers support really helped these kind of projects because it made it exciting and memorable.
ReplyDelete