This week we are wrapping up our study of American Indians. Our study has been far more general than specific, fitting with the state EALR/GLE (4.1.2 History). The specific name is: Understanding development of Indigenous Societies in North America. The reason for the lack of depth is twofold: 1) Native Americans are covered in greater depth in Grade 4, and 2) this sets the scene for the encounter part of this GLE where Europeans "manifest destiny" by driving them off the land. Without any prior knowledge of these people, and their ability to adapt, then you miss how devastating this encounter was.Tomorrow we'll be doing a scavenger hunt. A treasure hunt if you will, where the treasure happens to be important pieces of information. Embedded in this treasure hunt is the skill of deconstructing questions to determine importance (i.e. what information is most important in this question). If you can't determine what information is important, you're left with a big pile of information that you really can't sift through. Beyond that they'll continue to practice comparing and contrasting. They'll do this 2-3 times on this hunt. Finally, they'll be asked two higher order questions. First they'll need to name one reading/writing skill we worked on that everyone should know... and create a question where you would use that skill. Since this has been a big target for us, I am not imagining a huge issue with this. Then they'll need to name 3 big ideas or key pieces of information they think all of their peers should need to know.
This will give us some good fuel for Tuesday's round of Jeopardy, and our Wednesday assessment. Since I am most concerned about reading/writing skills, we'll have this as an open book assessment. Am I more concerned with their being able to tell me the climate in the Great Plains, or whether they can locate the appropriate information in the text? The latter is a more useful skill in my eyes.
As a pre-service teacher I am encouraged by your blog. One of my current assignments is to create a social studies unit. I decided to use a Native American theme. Without having any experience in planning a unit I found it difficult to come up with ideas this unit just using EALR's and GLE's. It is encouraging to know that great ideas are a just a blog away! I love the scavenger hunt idea and just might borrow it for part of my unit. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and ideas!
ReplyDeleteLook back through the GLE's. I say that because they often give suggested unit ideas- guiding you towards some of the big ideas. A good resource is the scope/sequence found here: http://www.k12.wa.us/SocialStudies/EALRs-GLEs.aspx
ReplyDeleteA great example is 5th grade, EALR 4 History. As you go through the online standards resource you quickly find out that 5th grade is largely about US History pre-civil war (American Revolution and before basically). From there you can start to cut yourself down to a time period or era, and pull on big ideas.
When we do explorers (1492-late 1600's), one of the big ideas is that settling was positive and negative. We'll also focus on the idea that explorers had many motives. We'll dive into who paid for them, where they went, and the impact when they arrived. Some of that is my direction, and some of that comes through examining the resources I have in my district- our text has 1-2 sections on explorers and we'll supplement with internet resources and some wiki work. So check back on the gle's, they can be super (duper) helpful.