Great Book for the American Revolution

The first year I was in the Back to History program we were given the book, Storytellers History, The American Revolution by Steve Sheinken. I have been reading it aloud to my students and they love it. They are actually disappointed when I stop and ask for more. It makes the American Revolution understandable and the stories about the people involved are great. It also uses excerpts from primary sources.

Great Website for Research

I recently attend the Conference for Ohio Middle Grade Teachers in Columbus. At one of the workshops, the instructor gave us several excellent website sources. One of them was www.thinkfinity.com. This is an awsome site. It is very user friendly and connects the user to multiple resources. I highly recommend this site for finding primary sources, lessons, or just background information on a particular subject. The content found is suitable for many abilities, interests and learning styles.

Response to article on history without reading

An essay titled "History without Reading" is running in the current weekly edition of the History News Network. The author is advocating "a history not of telling, but of showing ..." and draws interesting conclusions on the assumptions teachers make about how students study/learn history and the realities of 21st century students. (Cullen, 2010). What are your thoughts on Cullen's argument on how to prepare students for studying history?

Westward Expansion

Westward Expansion/U.S. Growth/Immigration always seems to be my weakest unit year after year (4 years now). I think this has always been the case because of the OAT and the need to rush to get through all of the content in time. No matter how well I've mapped out my year, something stands in the way of me having the necessary amount of time to really get into the unit the way i'd like. With no OAT this year I feel a sigh of relief that I can spend a lot more time on the unit and actually cover everything with a greater detail. There are so many levels to this unit, and I feel like it could be one that is stuffed full of hands on/group activities.

Last year I took all of the resources I had and created an organized unit that covered all of the standards/benchmarks that fall under the catagory of westward growth/immigration. It turned out be very beneficial and did the job, but it was still rushed and not nearly a indepth as i'd have wished. My hope is that some of you history teachers out there have some great resources that you'd happily let me know about so that I can expand my unit. I'm looking for anythng (reference books, teacher books, children books, websites/links and videos) that I could use to add to this unit. This is for a 5th grade unit and we cover: Growth westward following the American Revolution, transportation/communication/inventions/, Ohio Growth (good time to review) and Immigration.

Benefits of Experiencing History

I have always tried to incorporate hands on activities for students in all the lessons I do. Obviously, some lessons are easier than others to accomplish this. Social Studies was always harder for me to think of activities as well.

This is my third year teaching. This year, a new teacher came to my school who has similar teaching philosophies as I do. She also teaches Social Studies. At the start of the school year we talked about how we both wanted to do more hands on activities during our lessons. We spent a lot of time planning out our daily instruction with an emphasis on having the students get up out of their seats.

This last unit we both saw the benefits of teaching this way. We just completed a unit on the French and Indian War. During the unit one of our classes were French, while the other class was British. We then had a "war" with each other. We did not actually fight but we did send letters and leaders to each other's forts to try and convince them to stop the war. We then had to try and convince Native Americans to join our side. The Native Americans were the office staff, custodians, and other teachers.

The students were very excited each day for Social Studies. I had not experienced that in my previous two years. Each day the students asked what we were going to be doing that day, even before class started. When we tested the students we were worried that they were not going to remember details about the war. However, the students did very well on the paper and pencil test. We also received praise from parents. One parent emailed, "My daughter will not stop talking about the French and Indian War. She cannot wait to find out what happens next."

I hope to continue this the rest of the year. I know not every unit can go this well. Hopefully, we have not set the bar too high!