Mystery Artifacts

   I created an artifact bag with objects that pertained to the unit plan I taught in the second grade classroom, so my artifacts were all things that are related to "How the Colonies Became Free". My bag included 2 soldiers (one blue and one red for the Patriots vs. the Loyalists), a picture of George Washington, and a picture of a map of France and Spain. The soldiers were used to show the two different sides of the war, George Washington was a general in the war, and France and Spain helped us in the war. The students were supposed to look at those items and realize that they all describe the American Revolution. My artifact bag was geared towards second grade for the topic of "How the Colonies Became Free", and following the Social Studies standards under "Time, Continuity, and Change" and "People, Places, and Environments". The book I chose is The Pop Up Book of the American Revolution; I chose this book because it's appropriate for a second grade class. The students would love to look at a pop up book, but it also has a lot of important information within a few short pages. I chose this website because I think it's a great resource that we could explore as a class if they want to find out some more information. If I was doing this lesson with the second graders, then I would have read the book with the students after the activity and explored the website a little to show them some of the interesting things they could find on it.
   Fuhler, Farris, and Nelson (2006) emphasize the importance of teacher modeling because it's one of the most effective ways to increase students' higher level thinking and comprehension skills. I didn't necessarily model during this mini-lesson because there wasn't that much time, but I did model with a bag of my own during y fieldwork experience when we used artifact bags and I saw how much it helped the students. My powerpoint goes through the step by step process of how the students were supposed to go through the bag, so I had my peers do each step as I went through the slides. Even though I didn't model with another bag, I slowly went through all of the steps that I expected them to follow. Fuhler et al. (2006) also mention the importance of displaying the steps that you want the children to follow, which is what I did, but because I did my lesson in a small group, I went through one step at a time, instead of putting up a list. They wrapped some of their artifacts, which was something that I found interesting and I saw some classmates do, so I would definitely like to do that the next time that I use artifact bags. This is a great website to use when finding artifacts, which I will use in the future. I found this website on eclass and it gives you ways to find primary sources; students would love to see primary sources because it makes everything seem more realistic. I also found this source  from eclass to be helpful because it gives you ideas of how to go about finding and/or using primary resources for each grade.
   I absolutely love the concept of using artifact bags within the classroom because it hits all 5 of the elements of powerful social studies teaching: integrative, active, value-based, meaningful, and challenging. It's such an interesting and engaging way to reinforce a topic that you've already taught or maybe even to introduce a new topic. It's integrative because it can incorporate different core subjects and skills since the students have to really think about each object and the connection between them. Artifact bags are active because the students get to move around and physically touch the items, then discuss their thoughts about each one with their classmates. They're value-based in the sense that it shows you other cultures or parts of history and demonstrates that even though something may not be valuable to you, it can be valuable to someone else, so they have to be careful and respectful when touching the artifacts. Artifact bags should be challenging for the students; it should require them to genuinely think about their conclusion, not guess it right away. By incorporating all of these elements, the activity also becomes meaningful to the students. When an activity is engaging, hands-on, and just fun overall, then the students are much more likely to remember it because you've created a meaningful/memorable experience for them. This lesson could be adapted to work for any grade level, especially if you use the tips from the last source I provided because it really breaks down the different ways that you should implement primary sources and artifact bags throughout the different grade levels.




Here is the link to my PowerPoint I used to show my classmates my artifact bag!

Women Making History

    Another one of our assignments was to conduct a Current Events lesson and my group chose to base our lesson off of Women Making History. We assigned our classmates groups of four and each group was assigned to read an article from Newsela before class and to familiarize themselves with Tagul, which is a website where you can create a word cloud. In class, we reviewed some of the important women throughout history and explained what the 5 W's are (Who, What, Where, When, and Why). Once everyone was familiar with the concept, we ask the students to create a word cloud in their groups based off of the article that they read and they were required to include the 5 W's. Everyone was given a couple of minutes to create their word cloud and pick a shape that they thought summed up their article as well. We provided a picture of our own word cloud for the article that we read to share as an example:

After everyone finished, we asked the students to share what shape they picked and some of the words that they chose to include. The conclusion of the lesson consisted of the class participating in a Plickers questionnaire, which was a hit! Here is a picture of some Plickers cards in case you aren't familiar with the tool:

Here is the thinglink that we used to teach our lesson:

Overall, I think the lesson went really well because we were all very well prepared and enthusiastic about our lesson. The entire class seemed to be having fun throughout the entire lesson (including Dr. Smirnova)! It met all 5 of the powerful SS elements: active, integrative, challenging, value-based, and meaningful, which we have learned about throughout multiple course readings. This lesson incorporated multiple standards; one being that the students expressed the information in media forms. I also enjoyed my classmates' current event projects because everyone did something creative, such as including linoit, glogster, and kahoot.

If this lesson was taught in first grade, then I think the student would need more time and assistance and probably easier articles, unless I read the articles to them. If this was a sixth grade lesson, then I don't think anything would really need to be changed because nothing was too difficult about this lesson. I enjoyed using Newsels; I think that's it's a great tool! The articles are typically very brief, but packed with useful information, so students don't feel overwhelmed or bored with the article. One feature that I think is really cool and useful is that you can highlight parts of the article because that definitely came in handy when I had to read articles for the other groups' lessons. I also like that it was the little quizzes at the end, so you can see if your students actually read/understood the article. 

The Lakota Tribe

    This week we did another group project! The whole week was focused on learning about geography, so we were assigned tribes to study in groups and find out all of the general information, such as: where they live, what they eat, special traditions, what their houses were made of, and other similar information. Then at the end we had to make generalizations about our tribe and say how geography influenced them in particular. My tribe was a nomadic tribe, so geography heavily influenced them since it was the cause of why they kept moving. They typically followed the buffalo because it was a huge source for food, shelter, and clothing. This project was fun; I got to learn a lot about the Lakota tribes, but I also learned about the ones that my classmates did. For my group's project, we created a thinglink to present to everyone else; here is the link to our thinglink. Thinglink is a great tool that I've used for multiple projects since I've learned about it in this course. Here's a picture of our thinglink too:

I highly suggest looking at this thinglink because I think it came out really well; it contains a lot of interesting information and even some videos! Before we created the thinglink, we made a powerpoint, so if you feel more comfortable looking at that, then here is the link to our powerpoint. 

My group worked really well together and I felt comfortable presenting the information to my classmates. I think this was an interesting project to have us do and it would be very easy to do in any grade because students do research projects in every grade and having them make the generalizations about geography at the end is a great way to make sure they really interpreted everything they learned about their tribe.

103 Ways to Teach Geography

I found this presentation to be very interesting; I gained a lot of new, creative ways to teach geography that I can't wait to implement in my own classroom. One of the idea that I really liked was "Go Local" where the students can walk around their neighborhood and take pictures to bring in and share with the class. I think that would be a fun assignment and the students would be able to explore the area around their homes a little bit more. I also like the concept of having students create a 60 second film because little kids love doing things like that where they can be creative and pretend like they're making their own movie. It also develops their ability to summarize a topic because they only have 60 seconds to mention everything that they think is important. The Bingo game seems like a lot of fun too; I remember doing similar activities throughout my elementary school years. The definition would be read by the teacher and the students have to cover the word that goes with that definition. There are numerous other activities in the presentation that I would definitely incorporate within my classroom, but those are 3 of my favorites that I would personally love to do if a teacher assigned these tasks. We also discussed some of our favorite ideas from the presentation with the class and passed around a little Earth while we shared our thoughts.