Doing Social Studies: One more blog about what we love

Do we need another blog about social studies? I mean, there’s got to be hundreds, maybe thousands of blogs that talk about social studies. And almost all of them are very good.

I’m a little biased, of course. I like this one. It’s been around since January 2008 and so I’m kind of invested. But I do think there is room for another social studies blog – the more conversations we have about what we do and how we do it the better.

So.

A new blog.

Titled Doing Social Studies and maintained by the Kansas Council for the Social Studies, the site is a place

Learning is the end in mind, not fun

Every year, back in my Derby Middle School teaching days, we did Kansas Day. A big Kansas Day. As in . . . invite the newspaper, Board of Education, and parents kind of Kansas Day. I was the social studies guy on a teaching team and my goal was to find a way to integrate my social studies activities with math, language arts, science, and reading.

And a big Kansas Day fit the bill.

We organized all sorts of activities and projects for the day that students rotated through. Kids weaved wheat into hearts and shapes. They punched tin for pioneer lanterns. Sewed quilt pieces. Played frontier games. We had a blacksmith set up shop who demonstrated how to make horseshoes. A storyteller came and entertained.

It was always such a great day. Parents loved it. Made our principal look good when he talked with the newspaper guy. Kids were up and moving around.

It worked out so well that I started doing more projects and activities. I had kids use potatoes and paint to make African Ashanti cloth. We played Oregon Trail. Kids simulated the Constitutional Convention. You get the idea.

I was Project Man.

Because projects are good, right? My job was to engage kids. Have fun. Hook kids into liking social studies?

7 sweet social studies iPad apps I just learned about

I spent yesterday with a whole bunch of excellent K-12 social studies teachers – discussing how we can integrate iPads into instruction. I shared some ideas. They shared some ideas. We did some app throwdowns and as a result, I learned about some sweet apps that I had not heard about before.

I promised the group that I would share out the best stuff so . . . here it is, a list of seven sweet social studies apps that I just learned about:

Hungry Planet: What the World Eats

I recently ran across a very cool book that seems like a perfect tool for world geography teachers. Pretty sure we could use it in a variety of other content areas (especially economics) but I saw this and my mind went immediately to some cool compare and contrast conversations about world regions.

Titled Hungry Planet: What the World Eats by Peter Menzel, the book highlights the differences in diet of families from around the world. The book jacket:

On the banks of Mali’s Niger River, Soumana Natomo and his family gather for a communal dinner of millet porridge with tamarind juice. In the USA, the Ronayne-Caven family enjoys corndogs-on-a-stick with a tossed green salad. This age-old practice of sitting down to a family meal is undergoing unprecedented change as rising world affluence and trade, along with the spread of global food conglomerates, transform diets worldwide. In Hungry Planet, the creative team presents a photographic study of families from around the world, revealing what people eat during the course of one week.

Each family’s profile includes a detailed description of their living conditions, food security, and diet.

This is the same guy who wrote the very cool book Material World: A Global Family Portrait. Together the two books could provide weeks, maybe months, of useful lessons.

To get you thinking about possible lesson ideas, take a look at the following examples. Using either the Kansas state standards or you own local curriculum, think about this:

How might you use these images and the basic data included to develop a world geography lesson?

Kids don’t hate history, they hate the way we teach it

About 15 years ago, I had the chance to drive James Loewen around for a couple of days. He was in town for a two day workshop and afterwards had to get to Kansas City for a flight. As his chauffeur, I got the chance to pepper him with all sorts of questions. And much of what I wanted to know revolved around his most recent book at the time, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.

I was especially curious about the first few sentences in the book:

High school students hate history. When they list their favorite subjects, history always comes in last. They consider it “the most irrelevant” of 21 school subjects, not applicable to life today. “Boring” is the adjective they apply to it. When they can, they avoid it . . .

Once I got him started, Loewen went on to describe the incredible amounts of money being made by movie producers and book publishers who focused on historical topics. At the time, the viewing and reading public was fascinated with movies such as Dances with Wolves, JFK, Saving Private Ryan, and Gone with the Wind and books like Gore Vidal’s Lincoln and David McCullough’s John Adams.

Recent examples would be the recent movies Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty – or books like Unbroken and Killing Kennedy.

He was very clear about it:

Kids don’t hate history. They hate the way we teach it.