History is SPECtacular!

Anthony Fitzpatrick, Implementation Manager for the NJ Department of Education, was a guest speaker at one of the Teaching American History grant sessions in 2012. His book, Social Studies Can Be SPECtacular motivated me to change the way I approach the teaching of a time period. This is a close reading strategy that you can use tomorrow.

On Thursday, the second day of school, I started out by having my students brainstorm everything they knew about Abraham Lincoln. Students wrote down things like 16th President, lawyer, born in a log cabin, tall, beard, top hat, married to Mary Todd, had 4 kids but only one survived to adulthood. I then shared with them this Prezi that I had made and discussed Social, Political, Economic and Cultural characteristics. Finally students were instructed to group each item into one of those categories. It worked really well...except for how do you categorize tall? We skipped that one, but it did provide a nice side lesson about determining important vs unimportant facts.

I am excited to use it throughout the year as students investigate different time periods, set the context for historical documents and much more. I hope that you will try it out in your own classroom!

Mind Mapping US History?

I participated in a Twitter chat tonight and can't believe how much I have been missing out on by not being on Twitter until now. The #sschat topic tonight was on thematic vs. chronological teaching. Many ideas were tossed around and one of them was mind mapping the curriculum so that even if it is taught chronologically, students can see connections. I think I may try this since my US history team has decided to have a singular focus for 1st semester on the conflict between federal authority and state's rights. We will be discussing issues such as the constitution, nullification crisis, slavery, national bank in the first unit so it would be cool to break them into social, political and economic ways the conflict when throughout history. By the end of the year we could even connect it to today. I have taught mind mapping to adults and think that is a skill I will share with my students this year. And then we can create a giant mind map in my classroom which will help students visualize the connecting themes. Thanks @KaelynBullock for the idea!

Here is an update that shows the mind map I created for the unit discussed above. I think it came out pretty cool!