Tip of the Week – Hamburger Diagram

Having kids write is a good thing. Let’s all agree on that. Learning to communicate in written form is a 21st century skill that is non-negotiable. But training them to write well . . . mmm, not so easy. But using a Hamburger Diagram can help. In terms of knowledge representation, a Hamburger Diagram is [...]

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Tim Bailey – Cool Beans Primary Source Summarizer

Tim Bailey is good. He was the 2009 Gilder Lehrman History Teacher of the Year. He teaches at Northwest Middle School in Salt Lake City. He’s written several books for Scholastic that provide some great primary source teaching activities. And the awesome thing is that he’s here in Hutchinson working with our Century of Progress [...]

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Tip of the Week – Five Photo Story Telling

For years, magazines and newspapers have used photo galleries to tell stories. Photos can build emotion, provide information, encourage a specific action and create great questions. We can have our kids do the same thing by asking them to create Five Photo Stories. It seems like a great way for kids to activate prior knowledge, [...]

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Tip of the Week – SOAP

I met Wiley Popovitch at the NCSS conference several weeks ago and shared a handy, dandy primary graphic organizer with me that I hadn’t heard of before. Wiley teaches middle school in Arizona and says his kids use it a lot while working with primary sources. I like it too and figured I would pass [...]

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Tip of the Week – Thought Bubbles on Photos

Several of us were talking a few days ago about different ways to design hook activities that would engage kids while also encourage writing skills. My favorite is to use thought bubbles on paintings or photos. Thought Bubbles ask kids to imagine what the people in the image are thinking. Start by finding a photo [...]

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