Social Studies
Social studies curriculum tends to incorporate a lot of vocabulary and information. In order to accomidate students with this material, I try to make the information interactive and captivating.
History
While learning the history of Zeeland, students were assigned a homework task of learning about the history of their family. Students used post-its to create a graph a heritage graph on the whiteboard board. Then I remade their graph into a bulletin board. This was a great way for students to find similarities with their peers.
After learning about the history of Zeeland, we had a field trip to the Zeeland museum. This was a fun opportunity for students to make connections to their knowledge of Zeeland history.
Civics and Government
Students learned about the importance of making decisions. To help students form their own opinions about community controversial issues, students learned some of the core democratic values.
One issue we studied was whether or not chickens should be allowed to live on Zeeland residences' porches. This was a subject that interested many student because it was humorous but it also affected them. Students considered their core democratic values, and pros and cons. Then students formed a written opinion. Students were also asked to see if they could think of a compromise that could make all citizens happy.
Economics- Unit available from Social Studies tab
The economics unit required students to learn a lot of vocabulary; it was my goal to make this vocabulary as engaging as possible. I also created a Economics Word Wall that included basic definitions for students to reference as needed.
Students pretended to be representatives from different countries who were trading goods on behalf of their country. Students were able to experience trading and scarcity. Throughout the activity I took goods away from all students, this allowed students to feel how frustrating it can be when items are scarce but are needed for survival, such as water or wood.
Students learn about natural resources, human resources, and capital resources through a sculpture making activity. From the very beginning of this activity, students were reminded that they were making wooden sculptures with play-doh instead of wood because wood was too dangerous, this helped students to see that wood is a natural resource. Students were able to recognize that they were the human resource and that their pencils and scissors were the capital resource. After this activity, students were able to reapply these examples to help them transfer their knowledge as we continued to study resources.
To help students, review economic concepts, I integrated economics with the reading strategy of making connections. We read many fictional stories like The Lorax and Caps for Sale that incorporated our economics terms. Students used their knowledge to help them make connections with the characters and ideas in the book to our economic terms. This repeated exposure was very beneficial for students.