Digging Deeper into the Semester!

Let's Dig Up What Happened in Week Two!

This is my introduction slide that I shared with the class! I had so much fun designing this classroom and picking out my book! I never used Epic Books before and this website helped me find a great book that I can use in my classroom one day so that all my students can see themselves in literature. I shared my Flipgrid with you last week, but you can find the link to my blog here!

Above is my Digital Me project, which you can access here!

Time for Textbook Learning!

This is a picture of the textbook I will be using this semester!

This week, I read chapters 1-3 in my social studies textbook and I'd love to share what I've learned with you! 

The first thing I learned is that social studies is an integrated study of the social sciences and humanities to promote civic competence. It's important to teach because it helps young people make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society as an interdependent world. Experiences such as going on field trips to museums, acting out history scenes in class, and assigning fun projects can make the concepts of social studies "alive" and interesting for students.

This is me taking the train on my way to a fun, educational field trip!

The next thing I learned is that schooling itself went through an immense amount of changes to become the schooling system we know today. For example, social studies wasn't always taught. In the earliest schools, like dame schools, the primary focus was on literacy. It was important for children to learn how to read the Bible, not to study social studies the way that we do now. The act of teaching students about the past was started by the perennialists, who believed that the next generation needed to gain wisdom from the previous generation by learning what the events that took place. 

Here's a portrayal of what you would've seen if you walked into a Dame School!

I also learned some of the pros and cons of having Standards for education. Some of the pros of having standards are that they provide teachers with the knowledge of what they should teach and give teachers creative freedom to teach the way they want to. Some of the cons of the standards are that they are only uniform throughout each state, so each state has different educational standards and some of the standards aren't consistent with the way students teach. SS frameworks help teachers, including myself, design unit and lesson plans because they relay to the teacher what information they need to cover. 

Finally, I learned that teachers can prove positive and/ or negative outcomes of curriculum integration by monitoring their student's progress and seeing if they are becoming more successful when curriculum integration is applied. For example, a teacher can see that a small group that is working on a lesson the integrates math into social studies by analyzing charts, has a better comprehension level than a student individually learning social studies by itself. However, a negative outcome could be that if the curriculum isn't integrated properly, then a student could become even more confused about both subjects instead of gaining the stronger comprehension that integrated curriculum is looking to achieve. 

To see for yourself, you can navigate the New York State Social Studies Next Generation Framework here!

I hope you enjoyed learning about this week's experience and I can't wait to share more with you!