The deadline to submit an application to present at the 2021 MFPE Educator Conference is APRIL 30! That's this Friday.
The conference will be held October 21-22 in Great Falls and MFPE is accepting applications to present in person or virtually. That means you can present even if you can't get to Great Falls for the conference.
Will you help make the social studies strands as rich as they can possibly be by sharing your strategies, knowledge or best lessons? Click here to submit your proposal.
According to the smart folks at Harvard University's Project Zero, "Research has shown that engaging students in memory work immediately after the presentation of information helps learners to retain that information more effectively." So they came up with the +1 Routine, which "provides learners with a structure for identifying key ideas and committing them to memory."
To quote the +1 instruction sheet:
After reading a text, watching a movie, listening to a lecture, or being presented with new information or ideas in some manner, a group of learners does the following:
Recall In 2-3 minutes and working individually, each learner generates a list of key ideas that he or she recalls from the presentation that he/she feels is important to hang onto. Learners do this from memory rather than reviewing notes or material.
Add (+) 1 Learners pass their papers to the right. Taking 1-2 minutes, each student reads through the list in front of him/her and adds one new thing to the list. The addition might be an elaboration (adding a detail), a new point (adding something that was missing), or a connection (adding a relationship between ideas). REPEAT this process at least two times.
Act Return the papers back to the original owner. Learners read through and review all the additions that have been made on their sheets. At the same time they may add any ideas they have picked up from reading other’s sheets that they thought were worthwhile.
You can read more about how and when to implement this routine here. I thought +1 was so clever that I incorporated it in a lesson plan I included in our new footlocker, Montana's First Peoples: Essential Understandings.
You can learn more about Project Zero, Thinking Routines, and find additional tools to "scaffold and support student thinking" on the Project Zero website.
A few weeks ago, I posted ideas for engaging students in the last weeks of school. Cindy Duffy, a Great Falls high school English teacher (who was also a 2016 Montana Teacher Leader in the Arts), responded with some additional ideas for several grade levels.
1. BRAIN DANCES for WARMUPs. I had never heard of a brain dance so I did some googling and found this and lots more examples of different types of brain dances on YouTube. (Apparently, a Brain Dance gets students brains "ready, willing, and able to learn.")
2. In class reading for 20 minutes--relevant topics--then ORAL pop quizzes to check for understanding. This gets discussions going. She also uses Answer Boards with checkers or playing cards (to add a game element to the Formative assessment). They may be old hat to you, but I'd never heard of answer boards, so I asked Cindy for more information.
She sent the picture above and explained: the boards are laminated for easy cleaning, all questions are oral, and all answers are marked or covered by checkers, candy (skittles or M&Ms, or paper dots.) "The center square is for answering in a complete sentence with elaboration (for HS kids.)" And according to Cindy, it "feels like a game."
3. Integrating the Arts: poetry, drawing (thinking charts), music, theatre (role play) and 3-D projects
For more ideas to engage students, check out these suggestions I gathered from teachers at our March workshop "Hooks."
As I've been working on our new elementary curriculum (the Montana's First Peoples footlocker and the new fourth grade textbook), I realized that I don't have a good sense of how much time elementary teachers had to focus on social studies, or whether it is mostly taught as a stand-alone subject or integrated into other subjects (e.g., ELA). But I know who to ask!
If you teach K-5, would you take this brief survey? As a thank you, I'll enter your name into a prize drawing for a copy of the just-released book, Montana History for Kids in 50 Objects. Plus you'll have my eternal gratitude!
As longtime readers know, Deb Mitchell and I have been slowly, ever so slowly, revamping our hands-on history footlockers. We most recently took on Lifeways of Montana's First Peoples, and although it had some great lessons and cool material culture, we decided to pretty much start from scratch.
It was Deb's idea. She said: "If the Seven Essential Understandings regarding Montana Indians" really are essential, and we want every student to know and understand them before they graduate from high school, then we should give teachers the tools to teach them explicitly." And that's how the "Montana's First Peoples: Essential Understandings" footlocker was born.
I'm as proud of this footlocker as anything we've produced. The artifacts are amazing, so when we start circulating the trunks again (hopefully next fall), you are definitely going to want to check this one out. (Get a preview by scrolling through the footlocker content photos, starting on page 5 of the user guide.) However, even if you can't order the trunk, I strongly encourage you to download the user guide, since most of the lessons can be done without ordering the trunk.
We've written each lesson to teach an Essential Understanding, and we end almost every lesson by asking students--with help--to conduct a close reading of the Essential Understanding, and then to summarize it in kid-friendly language. By the time you've worked through these footlocker lessons, your students should know and understand the EUs.
Lessons 1 and 2 address Essential Understanding 1: "There is great diversity among the twelve sovereign tribes of Montana in their languages, cultures, histories, and governments...." with a fast-paced game (I Have, Who Has), the video Tribes of Montana and How They Got Their Names, and an exercise that has students up and moving around as they explore and share information (including maps) about tribes that were here c. 1800.
We address EU 2: "...there is great diversity among individual American Indians..." in Lesson 3: What Does It Mean to Be Apsáalooke? This lesson asks students to compare the music of Crow rapper Supaman with traditional Crow drummer Shane Doyle.
Lesson 4: Traditional Knowledge offers three ways (song, story, and art) to explore EU 3: "The ideologies of Native traditional beliefs and spirituality persist into modern day life... each tribe has its own oral histories, which are as valid as written histories."
Lesson 5 introduces two EUS, EU 4: "reservations are lands that have been reserved by or for tribes..." through treaties and EU 7: "American Indian tribal nations are inherent sovereign nations." The first part of the lesson explores the act of treaty-making (including troubles in translations) and asks students to calculate the amount of land tribes ceded to the US government versus the amount they retained for their own use. Part 2 introduces the concept of sovereignty and then explores one way the Fort Peck Tribes are exercising their sovereignty--bison restoration.
Lesson 6, which addresses EU 5 ("Much of Indian history can be related through several major federal policy periods") will works best with the trunk itself, since it has students creating a museum about the different federal Indian policy periods using the artifacts in the footlocker.
For EU 6 ("History is a story most often related through the subjective experience of the teller"), we created Lesson 7: Rosebud Battlefield or Where the Girl Saved Her Brother? Comparing Points of View. After analyzing two illustrations (from different perspectives) of the Battle of the Rosebud/Where the Girl Saved Her Brother, and being introduced to some background information on the battle and the Great Sioux War, students conduct a "Circle of Viewpoints" exercise, in which they consider multiple perspectives on the battle.
We've taken Lesson 8 directly from OPI's Crossing Boundaries Through Art: Seals of Montana Tribal Nations unit as a culminating exercise that touches on several EUs.
I really love this footlocker, and I hope you will too! Check out the user guide and let me know what you think.
P.S. The footlocker aligns with the new social studies content standards as well. (You can join us on April 20 from 4:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m. to learn more about those new standards at our monthly PD. Register here.)
Do you end your schoolyear on a bang or on a whimper? If a bang, what are your best strategies for keeping kids engaged and learning?
I was impressed with the ideas in this blog by Kansas middle school teacher Cassie Medley. In "It’s the most troublesome time of the year . . . engaging kids at the end," she outlines two ideas for making the end of the year count, including creating a classroom museum and conducting a social studies Olympics. Read the details on her blog.
And if you have tricks up your sleeve you'd be willing to share with your colleagues, email me and I'll share them out.
We were delighted in December 2019, when the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians finally received federal recognition and we're delighted now to provide this 30-50-minute PPT lesson that provides a brief history of the tribe. Designed for grades 5-12, Recognized at Last: The Little Shell Chippewa is our most recent IEFA lesson plan that touches on Little Shell history. We consciously kept it brief, so it would be easy to fit into your current curriculum.
A longer lesson, created before the Little Shell received federal recognition, is "Montana's Landless Indians and the Assimilation Era of Federal Indian Policy: A Case of Contradiction." This week-long primary-source based unit for grades 10-12 is designed to introduce students to the history of the landless Métis, Cree, and Chippewa Indians in Montana between 1889 and 1916, while giving students an opportunity to do their own guided analysis of historical and primary source materials.
Many Little Shell also identify as Métis. Others identify strictly as Chippewa. To understand the Little Shell's connection to the Métis, see the tribe's official website, Nicholas Vrooman's article, "The Persistence of the Little Shell People," in Distinctly Montana, and his longer and more detailed explanation in the Study Guide and Timeline OPI published to accompany his book, 'The Whole County Was ... One Robe': The Little Shell Tribe's America.
For a introduction to Métis history for younger grades (grades 3-6), check out our 30-50 minute PPT lesson "Who Are the Métis?"
P.S. Don't forget to register for our last online PD for the schoolyear, which will be held on April 20, 4 p.m.-5 p.m. The topic will be "The New Montana Content Standards for Social Studies." (Register here.)
The IEFA Best Practices Conference is scheduled for May 15-16. This is always one of my favorite conferences. There isn't much posted yet about the actual session topics, but OPI always does a bang-up job with this conference, and I always learn tons. Register (and find more information) here.
I also just found out that National Geographic is offering free online courses (with the opportunity to pay for graduate credits). Learn more and register here.
Six of them run from April 7-May 11, including "Integrating Service with Learning Goals," Collecting Data to Explore Plastic Pollution in Our Communities," "Connecting the Geo-Inquiry Process to Your Teaching Practice," "Mapping as a Visualization and Communication Tool in Your Classroom," and "Teaching Global Climate Change in Your Classroom."
But the one I'm most excited about is "Teaching Students to ASK Their Own Geo-Inquiry Questions." This course was developed in partnership with Harvard's Right Question Institute (RQI) and integrates RTI's Question Formulation Technique with the "ASK phase of the National Geographic Geo-Inquiry Process."
As longtime readers know, I've written about the Question Formulation Technique before, because I'm adamant about the importance of teaching students to ask good questions, which is harder than it looks. I was surprised to learn when a teacher invited me to come into her 11th grade American history class to help her students develop research papers, that many, many students struggle with asking good questions--but pleased to discover (from the RQI) that it is a learned skill.
Developing questions is also one of the six social studies skills highlighted in the new social studies content standards that go into effect July 1. (The others are planning inquiries, comparing and evaluating sources, gathering evidence to develop and refine claims, communicating conclusions, and taking informed action.)
Speaking of which, I hope you can join us for our final online PD on April 20, from 4:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m., to learn more about "The New Montana Content Standards for Social Studies." Register here.
