The Musical Struggle is Real The use of music in the classroom is something that I’ve struggled with for years. As much as I love background music when I’m working, I’ve found that the use of music in a classroom full of kids often causes conflict and chaos. For one,…
Back to School Time! The American Dream. It means different things to different people. I love to start each school year off by asking my students to explore the concept of “The American Dream” and define it for themselves. I usually start by asking them what the first thing that…
As is the case with all of our hat tricks, Social Studies bellringers tend to get a little tired and predictable after a while. Also called warm-ups, bellringers are supposed to get our students excited about learning, but they frequently result in moans and groans instead of enthusiasm for the…
We’ve known that we are getting new Social Studies standards in Kentucky for a few years now. We’ve belly-ached and moaned about the out-dated and vague nature of the Kentucky Core Content for Assessment in Social Studies for much longer than that. As non-ideal as the old Core Content was,…
Deja vu I love assigning research projects. My heart soars at the thought of young minds searching out information, gleaning scraps of knowledge from the pages of history and finding joy in the sheer act of learning. But then I grade the research projects and, for the most part, my…
Differentiation has been an educational buzz word for several years now, but I recently learned a new way to streamline differentiation in the classroom. Part of our back-t0-school professional development was a presentation based on The Differentiation Workbook by MindSteps Inc. Here’s the gist of what I learned: Students can be grouped…
To be honest, I’m a little overwhelmed. The first day of school is right around the corner and I haven’t done all of the things I wanted to do this summer! Theme parks, water parks and zoo adventures aside, I’m also anxious about the upcoming school year. I’ve done a lot…
If you’re looking for a resource with fresh ideas on how to implement common core standards in Social Studies, look no further than the book, Reading Like a Historian by Teachers College Press. I recently received a copy for free at a Social Studies network meeting and have been really…
Dimension 1 of the C3 Framework for Social Studies is “Developing Questions and Planning Inquiries” or to put it simply, inquiry based learning. The goal of every Social Studies teacher used to be for all the students to answer our questions. The new objective is to get students asking their own…
There was a time when teaching Social Studies was a downright easy gig. There was a distinct formula to follow that few teachers ever wavered from: Step one: Define vocabulary terms for the chapter using the definitions found in the back of the book. Step two: Read the chapter. Sometimes…