5 Ways To Teach Thanksgiving, Engage Students, and Not Lose Your Mind!

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I love Thanksgiving!  Mostly I love Thanksgiving because it means I get to put up my Christmas tree the next day, but I do really love having my whole family over to just spend time together.  Thanksgiving also is a great opportunity to sneak in some learning no matter what age you teach.  So, what are some awesome, low prep activities?

If you teach middle school, Thanksgiving is a great opportunity to talk about myths and legends vs. facts.  On of my favorite activities to do before the holiday was from Beyond the Bubble.  Beyond the Bubble is operated by the Stanford History Education Group and focuses on students being critical readers of history.  Beyond the Bubble has a great activity comparing the facts of the first Thanksgiving and the picture that was painted in 1932. Click here for the activity!

2) A teacher can never have enough books and little ones can not read enough!  In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, think about joining Epic! Books !  I’m going to blog more about Epic! Later this week but just know that your students can access high quality, digital books about Thanksgiving!  Students can read both fiction and informational text on the site and can find books that are read aloud.  Epic! Books are also great for young students to start their journey into researching!

3)  Have you taken a virtual field trip yet?  If not, one of my favorite simple and easy virtual experiences is taking a trip to Plymouth Plantation the week before Thanksgiving.  Head on over to Learn Around the World and let Brandon Hall show your kids around Plymouth Plantation and teach them about life among the Pilgrims and Wampanoag.

4) Introduce your kiddos to podcasts!  Podcasts are a super hit in my house and they help students create critical listening skills.  Stories Podcasts is one of my favorites. Students write stories and the lovely peopl at The Stories Podcasts act them out and add music.  They have a cute and short podcast about two sibling fighting about a Thanksgiving Pie Off.  I suggest it for 3rd grade and above:)

5) Lastly, I love to get the kiddos ready by playing my The History of Thanksgiving Digital Simulation.

The game is performed whole class but students compete in a group of 3 or 4.  I launch the activity by having students turn and talk and discuss the following essential questions:

What obstacles and what successes did the Pilgrims encounter as they attempted to survive at Plymouth?

Once students are in groups I give each student a point sheet and each group gets a spinner.  To use the spinner, the students need a pencil and a paperclip.

Once the students have all their paper resources, I begin the presentation.  The presentation has students spinning through the game to assign them their actions on how they would have acted in the months leading up to the first Thanksgiving. Every option in the game is taken straight from history.  If students “choose” the same path as the Pilgrims, they will be successful all the way up through the first Thanksgiving.  Students will also experience the difficulties the Pilgrims had on the way to success.

Last year when I played this game with a group of 3rd graders, they didn’t know that I had created it.  While we were playing, one of the kids turned to me and whispered, “Don’t tell my teacher but this is really fun!”  Engagement for the win!

Once the game is complete, I have my students go back through the presentation and analyze the information by completing The History of Thanksgiving: Questions for Understanding.  As a summary activity, I have the students create an advertisement that extolls the magnificence of the lives of the Pilgrims and and Warning sign that gets settlers to stay away because of the hardships.

If you are interested in The History of Thanksgiving Digital Simulation click here and head on over to my Teachers Pay Teachers page.  I promise this will not disappoint!

The Murders in My Classroom Continue

Every classroom benefits from these two purchases:

So, in the weeks before the holiday break, my kiddos walked into this.....

I you are a reader of my blog, you will recognize this as an activity I did last year on the Boston Massacre.  Read about it here! For those of you that followed along last year, do you love my new tablecloth?  Bloodier than last year's window clings and I get to use it again and again.

My eighth graders were so excited because they saw the set up of this last year.  They did such an amazing job!!!  These kiddos are champions of textual evidence and totally would have gotten those British soldiers off in a court of law!

If you are interested in using this in your classroom, click here for the resources and click here for the video website.

Explain Everything App, Primary Sources and YouTube.... A History Techie's Dream

Yeah....February vacation!!!! Although I am going to take it easy and just have fun with my baby girl (the boys had vacation this week.... How sad, right?) I have three school related tasks.

1. Enter professional development into the system.......Ugh! I'm up for renewal this year and in the last three years I have entered zero hours of development yet completed about 300. I also left that folder at school. Guess I'll be bringing the midget for a field trip!

2. Grade my Citizenship Project.... If you can find the time to blog about the project, I guess it's kind of pathetic that I haven't "found" the time to grade them. I tend to be pathetic so I'm okay with it but there is always time for change :)

3. Blog! My last post has received over 800 hits which is just ridiculous in such an awesome way. I had been keeping a list of blogging topics so I'm going to try to carve out the time to write at least two over break

As I have been documenting here, I have really been trying to wrap my head around the Common Core, their role in the middle school, and Social Studies' role in the standards. I tend to throw myself into things, sometimes forsaking others, to try to feel some semblance of mastery. I have continued to use the primary source lesson for Reading Like A Historian, a project of the Stanford History Education Group and continue to love them.

They have obviously seen the potential for major success because they have added content and reworked their web page. We had been learning about the formation of the first political parties with a focus on their founders, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. I had my kids use this great website that appears to be created by a fellow teacher (http://mrkash.com/activities/hamiltonjefferson.html) and they created a really great foldable. We watched the BrainPop video that detailed their differences, played Grudgeball to review and took a quiz that the kids aced. They really understood how different these guys were from each other. After I felt we had established the textbook differences I introduced the Reading Like A Historian's lesson, which included letters of from each of these men to George Washington. Sometimes I feel like the sole thing holding kids back from truly understanding primary sources is just the fear that they won't understand them. I have found a good way to take away this fear using an app called Explain Everything.

Explain Everything is one of those iPad apps that acts as a whiteboard and allows you to screencast. It does cost $2.99 and although there are a lot of free ones out there, this one has the capability for you to screen cast your actual use of a website. I bought this when I needed to create a video tutorial of our online sign up for parent teacher conferences and many of the free ones didn't have the capability for recording my use of a web page. This one does that and a whole lot more. What I wanted to use it for, this time, was basically to create a screen cast of me reading the letters with the appropriate emotion, focus, etc.

1. I went to Google images and got myself a picture of Alexander Hamilton and saved it to my camera roll. (I borrowed the picture from http://mrnussbaum.com/amrevolution/hamilton/)

2. I brought the picture into the Explain Everything app, added the title from the primary source document and simply recorded myself reading.

3. When I was all done I simply exported the video directly to my educational YouTube account.

4. For the kiddos, I created a Google Presentation and embedded these two videos.

I had the kids read these to themselves when they were done with the quiz. When I played them, I gave them the choice of listening or reading along. The point of the lesson is that Hamilton and Jefferson weren't just different. Jefferson was bashing Hamilton all over town and as one of my students said, "Um, Jefferson's kind of a jerk, Mrs. Wilkins." As they were listening to the letters I saw their faces register with understanding. The videos allowed them the freedom to really pay attention to the letters and not stress over them. I had already done this for the Shays' Rebellion lesson as well, so this definitively allowed me to know that attacking primary sources this way was successful.

So....are you trying to integrate more primary source materials into your classroom? Do you have any tips for us early stage Common Corers?