Historical Blog Experience

One of the main goals of this class is to help each other become better social studies teachers. In light of this objective I decided to look back on my own social studies teachers and make note of a few that were impressive and some not as much. To start, none of my favorite social studies teachers were elementary school teachers, as social studies wasn't dealt with all that much in elementary school, a topic I will discuss in another post. One of my favorite social studies teachers was my 11th grade teacher Mr.W.  What made him a great teacher was his passion.  He was a total history nerd and made you feel the same way he did about the subject.  Another great teacher was my 6th grade history teacher Mrs. B.  While she taught global history, a tough subject to get people excited about, she was able to make it fun with many group projects, and fun activities.  It's also worth noting that she was my only female history teacher I ever had in all of my secondar...

Our third lesson was about waste management and recycling.  The teachers had a great lesson planned for the students with fun activities that engaged the children and educated them as well.  One aspect of their lesson that I really enjoyed was their direct lesson.  For the direct lesson, the teachers had a power point presentation, however with the power point, there was a work sheet attached with all of the notes already on it.  The job for the students was to fill in the blanks on the notes, wherever they might be.  This was effective in keeping the students attention on the power point as not to miss any of the notes, and as a back-up the teachers would put a small light bulb picture after a sentence that was important for the students to know. Now that everyone in the class has taught, we will all now collaborate on a final project to coincide with our celebration of learning to mark the end of fieldwork.  The students all seem excited and the tea...

Four our second week of lessons, it was me and my partners turn to educate our group of students.  We decided to do our lessons on fracking and other forms of land pollution.  While the students were a little rowdy at first, they eventually settled down and seemed to enjoy the activities we had planned for them. Our direct lesson saw them coming up with solutions to fracking by putting their ideas on a poster.  The next activity had students do research on various land pollution problems affecting the environment, which the students also had to come up with different ways to fix these same problems.  Finally, students had to write letters to their future selves, making sure they are still protecting the planet and keeping up their "green" ways.  Overall I feel the students enjoyed themselves, and although it was a bit compressed due to time, we were able to accomplish everything we set out to do.  My partner and I enjoyed teaching this group of ...

Today we met our students that we will be teaching over the next few weeks.  Our job with these students is to inform them more about the risks of pollution and poor care to the environment. The theme for our group is "Everyday is Earth Day", and each week one of us will teach this group of children of different aspects of pollution, and how America has come to fight it.  For example, the first group is doing water pollution, and how it impacts the environment, and how it is being fought all over the world. I believe the goal for us as the teachers is to, not only practice teaching in front of students, but to inform these children about what goes on in the world, and prepare them to take hold of its future.

For my first blog post, I decided to ask myself what exactly is Social Studies.  Literally it is the study of being social, but it is actually, and not surprisingly, more complicated than that.  Social Studies refers to the study of history, ethics, geography, and law.  It is about taking a step back and looking at the past in a multitude of lenses.  As teachers it is our job to pass this knowledge of history to the children we teach so that they can go into the world and be sure to not make the same mistakes that many have in the past. So often that is our goal, but you can question if it really sinks in at any point.  My philosophy for teaching social studies is to arm my students with the knowledge of the past so they can blow down the doors of the future.  In the world we live in today, take notice of what around you and question everything.  Vague answers such as, "I don't know" don't fly anymore, because now is the time when history and kno...