Book Talks

This week  everyone in my Social Studies class did a Book Talk. A Book Talk is a 3-4 minute explanation about some of a book, however you never want to give away the end. The point of a Book Talk is to give enough information that the people listening to the Book Talk will want to read the book. Our class all picked chapter books that were relevant to Social Studies. We also each made a PowerPoint slide with the book's title, author, and at least one Social Studies Standard the book addresses. I think this is a great lesson. Students can read a good book, tell their class about it, and then the whole class would have an entire list of great, entertaining Social Studies books (not just textbooks).

Geocaching

We learned about Geo-caching in my Social Studies class. Anyone can Geochache, however teachers can use it as a great tool for teaching longitude and latitude, geography, and even history. When Geocaching, you use a hand-held GPS and look for hidden "treasures" by going to geocaching.com to get the coordinates of their location. One suggestion our teacher gave us was to use geographical markers as places to hide caches because they incorporate history and geography. I hope to use geocaching in my classroom, and to do it on my own time. It is a lot of fun!

Storypath

This week in my Social Studies class we learned about Storypaths, a hands-on structure to give memorable learning experiences to our students. We were taught about Mount Everest and made charterers for our story, then given a critical incident, that our characters had to react to. I think that using Storypath lets children question, investigate, and research on their own by engaging them in problem solving and helping them learn.

Voting

Last Tuesday I voted. I think it is very important for Social Studies teachers to teach their students how important it is to vote. Voting is our responsibility as citizens. A lot of people know about their rights, but don't feel they have any responsibilities as citizens of our great country.  I want my students to take both their rights and responsibilities very seriously.