Tip of the Week: Seven Social Studies Strategies for Back to School

(When you’re done here, head over to the updated version of Back to School ideas. You’ll find some sweet Geo Goodness, memes, scavenger hunts, art as history, and a handy Bootcamp unit.)

Yup. It’s that time of year already. The annual Back to School Ideas in a Social Studies Classroom post. And I know some are already back in the classroom but most of you crank up this week or next.

So. Here ya go.

Use what you can. Adapt what you can’t. Add your own ideas in the comments.

What not to do

Before we get going with what we know works, it’s probably a good idea to think about what doesn’t. Fourteen Things You Should Never Do on the First Day of School is a great reminder of what it looks like when we’re doing it wrong. Mark Barnes suggest that our goal is a simple one during the first few days of school:

You have many days to assess students’ strengths and weaknesses. You have months to discuss high stakes testing and standards. You’ll spend weeks probing the textbook.

The first day of school should be dedicated to rapport-building and to joy.

Your goal should be that students go home that night and tell their parents: “I’m going to love history class because Mr. Wiebe is awesome!”

History Mysteries

Our history and social studies classes need to be structured around the central idea that we’ll be using evidence to solve problems all year long. Encourage this idea from the very first day with a variety of mysteries and problems to mess with.

One of the simplest ways to do this is called History in a Bag. Purchase or find enough brown paper bags for all of your students. Write a number on each bag and give one to every kid. Ask them to place five personal items into the bag, close it and to remember the number (for identification later). These items can be anything in their pockets, backpack, etc. Place all of the bags in a pile and have the students select one at random.

Provide a series of questions that they will answer as they attempt to decipher these “artifacts.” Is this person male or female? What does this person value? How old is this person? Where do they live? The questions aren’t so important as the rationale used to answer the question. You want kids to start thinking about how we know what we know, to start to understand the historical process.

Have students get into groups of two or three to explain their answers. As a large group, ask kids to identify the owners of their bag’s artifacts. Lead a discussion about historical process and how we know what we know.

Kevin Roughton adapts the History in a Bag idea with his own Personal Artifacts. Why?

Harry Wong led me astray. After reading The First Days of School and having it drilled into my head that his methods were the be all, end all of classroom management I made myself into a clone. My first couple years I spent a ton of time the first few days practicing routines, reviewing procedures and explaining rules.

In other words, I spent the first few days doing everything I hated when I was a student.

I love this! So cool. Supports problem solving while encouraging a learning partnership between teacher and student rather than an adversarial one focused on rules and control.

Peter Pappas suggests something he calls The Detective Game. Same idea – the activity encourages working together to solve problems.

Use the SHEG

The focus of the Stanford History Education Group Reading Like a Historian curriculum is on US and World History. But. Wait for it . . . they also have a great set of intro lessons that help kids use evidence to solve everyday sorts of problems. Altercations in the lunchroom. Using evidence.

So even if you’re not US or World focused, you can still use the intro lessons to support critical thinking.

Smithsonian Learning Labs

The brand new Smithsonian Learning Lab will change how you and your kids collect, organize, share, and analyze primary evidence. It is seriously that good.

The Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access created the Smithsonian Learning Lab to inspire the discovery and creative use of its rich digital materials – more than 1.3 million images, recordings, and texts. It is easy to find something of interest because search results display pictures rather than lists.

Add your own notes and tags, incorporate discussion questions, save, then share. By encouraging users to create and share personalized collections of both Smithsonian assets and user-generated resources, the Learning Lab hopes to build a global community of learners.

So during your first week, plan on contributing to the community. Create your own account and begin adding kids to your online classes. Then ask your students to create a collection with a specific focus. This could be as simple as “create a collection of ten resources that describe America.” Or maybe “find and organize five images that describe you.” Or “find and annotate one artifact that is the most important artifact in American history.”

Maps Over Time

This idea perhaps works best for world history and geography folks but you could adapt it in a variety of ways. Start by providing students with a large piece of drawing paper. Ask your kids to draw a map of the world and label as many countries and bodies of water as possible. Let your students know that this is just a starting point and that you’ll be repeating the activity throughout the year. Collect the maps and put them away. Then every quarter or end of a unit, repeat the activity and ask students to compare / contrast their different maps. It’s a great way to help kids see and measure personal progress.

Adaptions? Just the US. Or just your state. Or just your city or school. Maybe just bodies of water. Or just major cities. Maybe a focus on some sort of economics.

Art History as History

Works of art have been around for thousands of years in just about every time period and culture your kids will be learning about. Art is a reflection of the time period and culture it is created in, so any introduction to art is an introduction to history. So start by highlighting paintings and sculptures from your different instructional units and ask kids to make inferences about the culture.  Even younger kids can draw conclusions about different clothing and what that might mean in terms of weather and geography. Ask students to think about hobbies and interests and about values.

Take advantage of ideas from the Smithsonian here. This post has multiple resources for connecting social studies and art. And be sure to chat with the art teacher to find additional resources.

Video & Board Games

I’m a big believer in all sorts of games. We know that play is good for the brain. So why not play a little (or a lot) during the first week? I’ve written before about my new favorite board game called Timeline – a perfect way to have fun while getting some formative assessment data about students’ prior knowledge.

The ReadWriteThink folks have a nice piece on using board games to support technical reading and writing. Some examples?

• Settlers of Catan
• Carcassonne
• Ticket to Ride
• A Few Acres of Snow
• Evolution
• Puerto Rico
• Imperial

Need a few places to find even more? Start with the Center for Gaming and Learning and their list to kickstart your thinking. Then head over to the Genosee Valley Educational Partnership. Use their search filter to find games specific to your grade and content.

There are also some quick and easy online games your kids can play during the first few days of school that focus on problem solving and collaboration:

• Pursued (Online geo game)
• Valiant Hearts (WWI mobile app / console game)
• Fantasy Geopolitics (Geo / World History / Current Events)
• Smarty Pins (Online Geo game)
• Mission US series (PBS US history sims)
• Stop Disasters (Geo / Econ sims created by UN)

And don’t forget about tools such as Kahoot and Quizzez. Both are very sweet little formative assessment tools that recreate the kind of timed bar trivia game that always catches my attention in Buffalo Wild Wings. It’s also a great way to engage kids in content, take surveys, and quickly get feedback on all types of questions.

Maybe use Kahoot to discover students’ tech access outside of school or measure prior knowledge. Play the team version. Embed some of the mystery stuff we’ve already talked about by posting images or videos into your questions – forcing student groups to not just solve mysteries but post solutions in a more visible way.

Create some social media

The election is heating up. One way to create a little buzz the first week of school and start kids thinking about political connections is to ask students to mashup current social media tools with past events. If current social media tools were available to historical presidential campaigns, what would the branding look like?

What platform would people of the past have used? What would they say? Could kids take speeches, letters, photos, from past elections and create messages for social media? I think the answer is yes.

It needs to be crafted and structured well but asking kids to use primary source evidence wrapped inside modern tools could be a way to help them think a bit more deeply about the messages contained within that evidence.

One tool that could be use for this is something Recite. Recite is a quick and easy tool that lets you and students create visual products that can be used in both current and historical social media posts. No account creation needed. Easy to use. Easy to share.

Simply type in a message, select a style, and click Create. Easy peasy. Take a screenshot or share via traditional social media options and you’re good to go.

Have fun!