Week 3

The last two days at school the 8th grade students have been taking midterm. Yesterday they took the World Language/Reading midterm and today they took the Math midterm. During the time they were not testing we watched a movie called October Sky. This is a movie I have seen multiple times in the past and I really enjoy it. The students seemed to enjoy it as well as they laughed at many different parts. The movie follows the true events of the "Rocket Boys," including the main character Homer Hickam, Jr. After the launch of Sputnik 1 by the Russians, Homer becomes interested in rocketry and eventually some friends join him in creating and launching their own rockets. Homer Hickam is a real person that eventually went on to work at NASA as an engineer and helped train astronauts.

My "ah-ha" moment came today as the movie was ending and I realized that earlier in the day I had read a headline in a newspaper that today is the 28th anniversary of the Challenger disaster. I thought to myself "wow, this is really ironic." Now I can't say that I remember when this happened (I was in my mother's womb) but I did grow up knowing and learning all about it. This event is especially infamous in the school I work at in Bow because it is a community of Concord, where Christa McAuliffe taught Social Studies at Concord High School. I still can't believe this coincidence but what stands out the most to me is this connection that I made. That is what school is really all about. When students make connections between one thing and another, they have their own "ah-ha" moment. I hope that when I become a teacher I can assist many students in having many "ah-ha" moments.

Week 2

A few weeks ago a Social Studies teacher whom I work with asked for my input on an idea she had for a classroom activity. We are currently studying the Constitution in class and her idea was for the end of this unit. She calls it Constitution Station. The basic framework was to have students in groups go from station to station looking at pictures that hint to certain Article and Sections of the Constitution. The students need to figure out which part of the Constitution each station's pictures hint to. My input was that I really liked the idea. We continued to collaborate and discussed the process of the activity, which parts of the Constitution we wanted to focus on, and what the pictures and the student's worksheet would look like. This teacher asked for my help in creating the rest of the activity which I was eager to do. I spearheaded the operation.

The teacher picked out eight phrases from the Constitution that she wanted to focus on/wanted the students to know about. Then I found three to four pictures for each of the eight stations, there are twenty-four pictures in all. Each individual picture hints to a specific word or part of a phrase pertaining to that specific "station." The teacher created a blueprint of the worksheet the student's will fill out and I made a few changes in order to accommodate the activity. We both decided on a final version. During this process I told the teacher about this course I am currently taking, which involves teaching with technology, and realized it only makes sense to incorporate technology into this activity. Our school recently adopted Gmail, therefore Google Drive has become popular among teachers and students. I decided to simply create a Google Presentation for each of our eight stations with the pictures on them. Previously, we were going to just print the pictures out on paper and place them at each station. I made eight different Presentations and an answer key document for the activity and used Google Drive to "share" everything with this teacher. On the day that we are going to implement this activity the teacher is going to open a different Presentation on eight different laptops and the students in their groups will rotate from one to another, filling out their Constitution Station worksheet.

I am so glad how everything has turned out so far, it really wasn't too difficult and it didn't take very long to create everything. This activity has certainly come to fruition and I look forward to the day the students take over. The last idea I had about this activity for this teacher was the option of developing this into a project. Students in groups would be given part of or a phrase from the Constitution and would have to create their own "station" with appropriate pictures. Groups could still rotate from station to station or could present their station on a Smart board in front of the class and the other students would have to piece the rest together. Each group would then present in this same fashion.

Introduction

This is the beginning of a blog I have created for the course Using Technology to Teach Social Studies at Granite State College. I used to have a blog many years ago and enjoyed blogging about things that interested me. My undergraduate degree was a B.A. in History, so I look forward to blogging about Social Studies for grades K-8.