The tired stereotype of the history teacher at the front of the room lecturing from bell to bell, droning on about nothing but names, places, and dates, and never noticing the kids sleeping in the back row needs to be thrown out the window! In its place, how about a teacher that never lectures but instead provides students time to work hands on with the content and apply their learning from bell to bell?
With Flipped Learning, this is possible in every social studies classroom!
Holy Google! Have you gotten the opportunity to start using all of the amazing Google resources in your classroom yet? I am kicking myself for not implementing these tools in my classroom earlier, and I haven’t even been teaching for very long! I want to take the opportunity to share a few very short and quick strategies with you that I have used in my classroom and that are very simple to implement in any classroom, and are also very quick and easy.
Trust me. I know what most of you think when you hear about a new piece of amazing technology that you can use in the classroom – a used car salesman probably comes to mind when I start talking and you immediately want to tune me out. I also know what it is like to get information overload on new strategies and then forget about them two days later because it is impossible to use all of them in your room in the short window of time you have before you information overload again at the next inservice day.
The great thing about these Google resources is they are something that you can create in five to ten minutes and they can be used immediately in your classroom! It is seriously a very good thing that my plan period is 1st hour because I am planning and creating Google activities the day I teach them on a weekly basis. Nothing says professional teacher quite like procrastination!
First, I want to introduce you to one of the ways that I use Google Forms in my classroom. Continue reading It’s a Google World and I’m Just Teaching In It (Part 1)
Something I like to do with my sixth graders is start each unit off with a vocabulary activity. There are several different things I’ve done, sometimes I take about 30 words from the unit and have the kids put them in categories before I tell them what the words mean. I let them choose the categories as long as they have at least 4 or 5. Kids work in groups then share with the class. We compare categories and see which ones are similar – it’s a great way to introduce words that kids have never heard of before. Continue reading Vocab: A great place to start!
This week in my class we are starting a new unit that comes with several vocabulary words that my 7th grade students aren’t used to hearing. Before jumping right in to the content I want to make sure that they have the background knowledge they need to comprehend what we are learning, so we are focusing first on the new vocabulary. Continue reading Visual Vocabulary
