This Day in History...

For our english class here at I.U.S.B we were assigned to make a book of our very own, it could be anything we wanted to as long as it had to do with spring. For my book I decided to give it a Social Studies theme. I chose to make my book all about the events in history that have taken place on the first day of spring. I started plannig for my book by deciding how many years that I wanted to cover. When i considered how many pages our books were i decided to make it a span of 20 years. I knew that the first day of spring was March 21st so I just used a few websites ( I will list them below) to see what events took place on that exact day from 1991-2011.

How can you use this in the classroom?? I think that this would be a great activity to use in the classroom to get students interested in things that happend in history. I also think that it would be a great idea for students to use their birthdays to see what happend in history. This gives them a personal connection to the research and makes it interesting to learn what happend on the day that they were born over the years. I enjoyed doing this anyways but I think it would have been even more fun to do my birthday! This also gives students a great opertunity to use computers and research their day!! These were a few of the sites that I found that were really useful:

www.thepeoplehistory.com

www.brainyhistory.com

www.datesinhistory.com

What are You Wearing??

This is a great activity to teach students about location!! It doesn't even require them to bring anything but themselves fully clothed. What you do is have the students look at all of the labels on their clothes and see where they are from. The shirt on the left was made in Mexico, and the pants on the right were made in Korea. What we did for the exercise in class was to take a look at our clothing and see where it was made. If you need a little help you can ask your neighbor to look at your shirt tag. For younger students you may want to make sure to tell them that shirts, shoes and possibly pants are okay to do but you would not want to be looking at underwear tags in class. Once the students have figure out where their clothes were made they are now able to find on a map where their clothes came from. I would probably use this activity for the upper grades. You should supply the map for the children and it can even be blown up for students to be able to see better. They can then take a color and color in the place where their clothes came from. This would be on a blank map so it may be a little harder for them to be able to find all of their locations on a map. It was actually hard for some of us as college students to be able to find these places. For this you can have an atlas out that they can refer to and find the location for them selves! This helps them to not only become more aware of how to use a map but also to become familiar where certain places are located.It is also good to see where the most colored area is and that the United States is not colored or barely colored. this would also be a great lead in lesson to be able to start talking about trade between different countries! Whatever the way be that you use to teach this, the students will remember. You really get them excited and involved, It is an important to relate these ideas back to their own life and purchasees so that they can relate.

Those Were the Days.....

The decades project that we were involved in a few weeks ago was not only a great learning experience for us, but it would also be a great learning experience for the students in your class! We started off by having a range of dates from the 1900's through the 1970's. We then formed our groups and started planning. From within the group it is a great experience to have to research and plan out what things you would like to include. For this particular day we were assigned that we had to see what life was all about in our decade in terms of: dance, music, people, inventions, disasters/ scandals , movies, books and historical events. This is something that you could change and have students focus on things that you were learning or things that would fit better with the standards that you would be going

over. This in a way makes students an "expert" on their decade. This makes them feel important and to be able to share information that they have learned with their other classmates. When doing this project in a classroom it is also very important to have the students walk around and view all of the other presentations and decades. Have them ask questions and engage in conversation as if they really were from that period of time! You can have students create their presentation in any way that they would like, they could use a PowerPoint, a movie, a poster board or anything that they want to come up with to you. Getting the costumes to dress up may be one of the harder things but that is something that you as a teacher can help them to come up with. It is a great opportunity for learning and being creative but is also able to be adapted and changed to tailor your individual classroom! It will be an experience that I am sure none of your students will forget!!

Digital Story Telling

Bring a classroom story to life! This is a great project to not only use as an aid to teach students but also an experience for them to get involved in. For our class we used the book January's Sparrow by: Patricia Polacco. We also plan to use this digital story in our unit about the Underground Railroad. If you wanted to use this project in your classroom, especially for younger students, you would need to make the video ahead of time. You can make a movie on Window's Movie maker if you have a PC and imovie if you have a Mac. Both programs are a little hard to use but it is easy to get the hang of. There are also "how to" videos on YouTube that will guide you through some of the process. I really liked using the imovie to create our digital storytelling because we were able to almost take a PowerPoint of still pictures and make it come to life. I thought that this was a lot easier than piecing together a bunch of video clips. When recording the voices you are also able to record then place the speaking parts where they need to go. This is nice to not have to have the voice over exactly where it needs to be placed because you can always just move it. This is where it could get very exciting for the students. If you had a younger class you could make the imovie or Windows move and then have them be different characters in the story. This would also be a good final project for a book that they have read. You could have students predict what they think would happen if there were to be another book. You could also have them as a class decide on one story to use and to draw pictures that go along with the story. These pictures can then be used as the movie. Then you have students record the speaking parts. I think that students would be really excited to see their art work and voices be made into a movie! It is a great final project you can use and include kids, or it could be a great teaching tool to help introduce a topic or book. Either way technology is always a great aid in teaching!!