Middle School Teachers, this is for you

Instead of one long post, I'm going to send out three more targeted posts this week, so ignore the ones that don't apply to you. But for middle school teachers looking for online resources, read on.

The National Archives' series of twenty-minute mini-webinars on using DocsTeach,  which offers tools to use primary sources from the National Archives. You can participate in person Wednesdays at noon Montana time or watch past webinars on YouTube.


Speaking of primary sources, check out this Image Analysis Choice Board to use with students analyzing maps, lithographs, photos or other images.

April Wills of Bainville, who is also a Teacher Leader in Montana history, discovered that Newsela has gathered all Montana-related articles under the heading "My State, My Community: Montana." If you don't know Newsela, you are in for a treat. The site takes written sources (including news articles and historical documents) and rewrites them at a variety of Lexile levels. Their toolkits provide information on using the site for distance learning.

Check out this article from Junior Scholastic on Navajo code-talkers during WWII: "The Code That Couldn’t Be Broken."

Do You Want to Be a Cowboy/Girl? is a new lesson I've excerpted from Unit 3 of our new fourth grade curriculum because I thought it could be easily adapted to distance learning. It was scheduled for classroom testing this spring along with the rest of the unit but life got in the way. I'm optimistic that it will be useful, however, in our current situation, so I went ahead and posted it. I'm sharing it with you because even though it was designed for fourth grade, distance learning makes it harder to scaffold material and these sources should be accessible and understandable to middle school students without scaffolding. Other "fourth grade" lessons that might work for middle school students include "Exploring Montana Today through Population Data," Part 1 of Montana Today: A Geographical Study. The resources we've gathered for biography projects may also be useful. These links to 48 Montana Biographies and The Gallery of Outstanding Montanans, and the Biographical Poems Celebrating Amazing Montana Women Lesson Plan. (The lesson plan is easily adaptable to include both men and women.) And, of course, there's always Montana: Stories of the Land, the accompanying teaching resources, including the Learning from Historical Document units.

And now a plea: The quality of Teaching Montana History depends on your input. If you have not yet shared your favorite Montana history lesson, how you've adapted MHS resources to distance learning, or expressed your opinion on what topics we should focus on next year, please click here to take our survey. Everyone's favorite posts are the ones where I share what's worked in classrooms across the state, but I can't do that unless you tell me what's worked in your classroom.

Need a little incentive? I’m adding another prize for the fifty-second person to complete the survey. Will it be you?