In my post about the Buffalo Unity Project a few weeks ago, I asked folks to send me information about the place-based projects they were doing with their students. Bainville fifth-grade teacher April Wills responded:
This year we will be doing a 4 week unit on the effects of the Yellowstone River on Eastern MT. We will make ties to YNP, learn about the diverse ecosystems, homesteading efforts and conservation through time. We will partner up with our HS CTE teacher and 5th grade students will work alongside HS students to learn about surveying, planting crops, irrigating land and using native species to enhance the production of crops in the area. We will wrap up with creating model homestead sites that will be made to scale, create a historical narrative about what the family faced and overcame, and finally get the Montana Historical Society trunk on homesteading to lead us to our last week of school, when we will go to the confluence, do some rock hounding for agates, and learn about fish species in the river. So all in all it isn't just a social studies project, but it will encompass many content areas. I am working out the lesson plan for this and would be happy to share that once it's complete.
If you want access to April's lesson plan, contact me and I'll put you in touch.
If you have a great lesson to share, I hope you'll complete our end-of-year survey. Among other questions, I always ask folks to share a resource, lesson, or strategy that they plan to do next year no matter what. I collate them into a series of grade-level posts that I send out every fall at the start of school. These posts are everyone's favorites, including mine; by sharing tested ideas and materials, they make social studies better across the state. Need more incentive? I always give prizes: this year to the eleventh, eighteenth, twenty-eighth, thirty-eighth, and forty-eighth person to complete the survey.
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