Somewhere along the way, we’ve been made to feel like teaching facts is wrong, but that’s not the case at all. There is a basic level of information students need to know to be able to perform performance tasks and higher level thinking activities. One of my all time favorite teaching books is Why Don’t Students Like School which was written by a cognitive scientist who specializes in HOW the brain learns. In the book, he confirmed what I’d always suspected, that there was a time and place for teaching, exploration and reviewing basic level information.
That being said, I absolutely do not believe that social studies and science should be nothing but rote memorization and meaningless dates and facts. Students need to have the opportunity to interact and experiment with the content to truly learn the material. This is where the third step of the process comes in-exploration activities.
This is probably my favorite part of instructional process, because it’s often where students have that “aha” moment. These are the activities that bridge the gap between basic facts and vocabulary to being able to apply what they’ve learned in meaningful ways. This is the hands-on, active learning portion of instruction that students love and make connections with, that will allow them to retrieve content from their long term memory at much later dates in the year.
It’s fairly easy to create hands-on learning experience in science, because the content naturally lends itself to experiments. I absolutely love teaching through mini stations and activities, because I feel like it’s the best way to get the most out of my time. I’ve included a few links to a few of my favorite blog posts that give examples of how I use this strategy in my classroom. I also plan to use The Science Penguin’s Weekly Five science lessons for topics that I haven’t made any activities for.
Occasionally, rather than completing station activities we complete whole group experiments. This exploration is particularly useful when I’m limited on time. I’ve linked a couple blog posts on whole group science experiments that were successful in my classroom.
I have found that social studies is quite a bit more difficult to plan for than science. It’s a little too easy to solely rely on texts and allow social studies lessons to become dry and boring for students. That is absolutely what I don’t want, so one of my summer goals is to develop station like activities for all of my social studies topics. I’ve already done this for geography {see the post here}, and it was definitely a success. I created it in a station format that gave students a lot of exploration, movement and active learning. Since, I’m breaking down my geography into two mini units, I may split the activities into two parts, so students complete half of the stations the first week and the other half the following week. This will save so much time, and will make the tasks much more manageable for students.
I’ll make as much as I can over the summer, because once the year gets rolling it’s so hard for me to be creative. Unless I have a plan, I find myself slipping into old, comfortable routines that I want to break away from.
You can find a ton of ideas for the Revolutionary War from Teaching in Room Six’s blog and Mrs. C’s Classroom. Mr. Educator’s products are a bit too advanced for my third graders, but if I taught fifth or sixth grade, I’d definitely be using some of his resources!
Anyone who knows me, knows that I love incorporating art into my instruction, but at this point I am very careful of not allowing my lesson to become more centered around the process or product than the content. Don’t worry, I’ll have more about that later!
It may take a little extra time to plan these lessons, but it’s well worth the investment.
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