What Do You Value?

In my social studies rotation we have focused on reading comprehension. A big part of that, in nonfiction particularly, is finding the main idea. But you can only go so far with that. Ultimately we need to be exercising our thinking skills, and trying to make sense of the information.

So the past 3 days have been focused on forming conclusions. "What do you think, did explorers have a positive impact on history or a negative impact?" Aside from the question "what do you mean 'impact'?" it has gone pretty well. I had them think of a scale, with the idea that the things which are most important to us influence our decisions/opinions.

We took some statements about explorers (conquered the Aztecs, found new land, etc) and placed them on a two-column chart. Then we looked at them altogether, and made a judgement one direction or the other. How successful was that? Mixed. Some really struggled looking holistically, while others were very clear about their opinion. The writing is still a work in progress, and tells me that I need to provide more writing instruction to get them where I want them to go. But I was happy that they were struggling with the ideas of positive and negative impacts. When I have kids saying, "Mr Hanson, it could be both positive and negative" I know that they are thinking critically about the information- precisely my objective.