Make It Work!

Yep--the post title is a Tim Gunn reference; much to my colleagues' amusement (and really to the amusement of anyone who has ever seen me), I was a big Project Runway fan. And like Project Runway contestants during an unconventional material challenge, Montana teachers are taking what they are given and making it work. (And yep--that's a pretty tortured metaphor. I'm blaming social distancing!) Anyway, here are a few ideas you might be able to make work with your students.

Elementary

Billings elementary librarian Ruth Ferris reports that the second graders at Washington Elementary use SeeSaw, an app that lets students create digital portfolios. When one of the kids asked her to read them a Magic Treehouse book, she chose Earthquake in the Early Morning, about the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. After videoing herself reading the first three chapters, she posted a photo of the earthquake from the Library of Congress and gave the kids this writing prompt: "Imagine yourself in the picture. Use your senses and describe what you see, hear, smell, touch, and taste." Ruth noted that she found the prompt on an Early Childhood Primary Source Analysis "Choice Board" she found on Primary Source Nexus (a free group for teachers to share teaching with primary sources ideas.) Here's what one of her second graders came up with:

 Middle School

At the last OPI Social Studies Sharing/Learning session, Bonner middle school teacher Dylan Huisken shared some of the ways he's thinking about prepping his distance learning classes. His school is using both packets and Google Classroom, and he's careful to make sure that students are getting the same assignments in both places so as not to disadvantage students without internet access. He talked about what he was doing with all his classes, but my ears perked up especially when he talked about Montana History. I was pleased to learn that in addition to assigning chapters from the Montana: Stories of the Land textbook (which he's photographing and sending home), he's also selecting primary sources from the Learning from Historical Document units that go with each chapter. (For Chapter 6: Montana's Gold and Silver Boom, which his class is working on now, he chose Emily Meredith's Letter to Father, from Bannack, 1863.) For kids working online, he's using AdobePro to save the PDF National Archives' Document Analysis Tool as a Word Doc, so his kids can type right into it. (Kids working packets get a hard copy.)

In addition, Dylan is adding ungraded enrichment activities to his online site (for example, links to explore ghost towns), as well as videos and PowerPoint narrations he's recording in Loom, a free screen and video recording software. These are not required, but for kids who are interested, they are available, and Dylan sees them as an investment in the future. This online treasure trove will be extremely helpful once in-person school resumes--especially for kids who miss school or who need extra review. Most excitingly, he's toying with instituting "Enrichment Fridays" next year during which his students will either work on a National History Day project OR spend the class period exploring the enrichment resources he's collecting on his website now. I love how Dylan is planning for the future, so that the extra work he's doing now will serve his students well next year. I'm also excited to learn that teachers are still using primary sources with their kids.

Speaking of Primary Sources...

I hope that those of you teaching Livestock and the Open Range (Chapter 8) will check out our new lesson, Do You Want to Be a Cowboy/Girl? Easily adapted to distance learning, the lesson asks students to conduct guided research of very accessible primary and secondary sources to decide if they would like to have been working cowboys or cowgirls on the open range.

Sharing/Learning Sessions

The next Social Studies Sharing/Learning Session is Tuesday, April 28 at 2:00 p.m. Find la schedule/inks to all of the upcoming sessions here (look for the link in the righthand column.)