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Hey, teachers. If you have a classroom and a commute, you're in the right place. I'm your host. Rachel and I want to ride along with you each week on your ride into school. This podcast is the place for busy teachers toe want actionable tips, simple strategies and just want to enjoy their job more. Let's go. Hey there. Thanks for listening to the class and commute today on your ride into school, your ride home or wherever you may be today. Listening in. Um, before we get started, I want to tell you about a free members resource library that I have over on the website classroom nook dot com. And it is loaded with free, printable LS for you, your students. There's even video tutorials over there, and it's all completely free. It's just a curated collection. Off a ton of resource is for all subjects, and it's all waiting for you over there on the website classroom nook dot com. Look at the top of the website. You'll see Members Resource Library link, and you can click on that and I'll get you set up over there. I'll also put a link in the show notes at classroom nook dot com. Forward slash podcasts for its slash three All right today, let's dive into today's topic all about ways that you can make history or social studies, or we want to call it Come alive in your classroom. It's no secret that teaching history in the elementary classroom can be a struggle. Teachers are faced with the challenge of making people and events of the past relatable to young students who have a hard time even remembering or caring about the events and people off last week, let alone last century. So that's why I'm making history come alive in your classroom is so crucial to make students care about what you're learning. But lucky for you, I love a good challenge. Over the last several years, I've been developing curriculum for grades three through five. I've figured out a few ways to help make your instruction more engaging when teaching about the past. Today I'm gonna share with you 10 ways, and then I'm gonna put a ton of resource is and links over on the show notes at classroom nook dot com. Forward slash podcast forward slash three, and you can use those resource is check him out as they relate to the things that were going to talk about today. So let's dive right in. The first way to make history come alive is to use readers theater. I have become obsessed with creating readers theater. It's something that obviously has been around for a long time, but I don't know of teachers really think to use them in the content areas. A lot of times we use it for fluency and in our reading instruction, but don't necessarily use them in science and social studies. Well, I think it's a great way to teach new things in social studies using readers theater. It's one of the easiest ways to make content that you normally find in a textbook or an article much more appealing to your students. And when students act out specific events in history, they can see themselves their inaction and take part in the past. And I simply just take content that's in the textbook, like I said, and breathe life into it through dialogue. If there isn't a specific person already connected to the event, I created character to tell about the event. So, for example, I have this readers theater that I used with my students when we were talking about the American Revolution and I created this dialogue between several different colonists as they were discussing the no taxation without representation, part of history in the American Revolution. And I just created a simple dialogue that the colonists had back and forth as they discussed how the taxes were unfair. And I even included King George and his take on the taxes and why he felt he had the right to impose them on the colonists. And instead of reading about that in the textbook, the students read about it and acted it out through this readers theater. And I'm gonna be honest with you. I cannot find a single topic that you can't create a reader's theater on. I've done them on the water cycle on pollination, where bees air talking to each other about the process of pollination. I've done it on the trail of tears. When discussing Native Americans, I've done them on animal adaptations. There are just endless ways that you can somehow come up with a reader's theater to teach them a new concept to your students. I have a whole resource on readers theater on my website on I will link to that in the show notes and I also have a huge library of readers theater scripts that you can just take in using your classroom, and I will link to those as well. The next way to make history come alive is through gallery walks, so if you're unfamiliar with the gallery walk, teachers use him in a variety of ways. But here's how I use them. A gallery walk is when you set up several stations or sections around your classroom, and each section has pictures and artifacts and posters and books and other objects about a specific topic. And as students go from station to station, they are reading and looking and touching and feeling all the things that you've placed at that station, and they're interacting with each other and talking about the things that they find there. You can have them fill out some sort of activity. She I'll often like to have a poster at each station with some markers and kind of have them create a graffiti board where they jot down questions or draw pictures of things that stand out to them what they're learning at that particular station, and it's a much more engaging way than to have students read out of the textbook or an article of some sort. So let me give you an example of a gallery walk that I have used with students in my westward expansion unit. We talk about the War of 18 12 and it's not a huge part of the unit as a whole, but it is something that we need to talk about. And I wanted to do it in a short period of time where students could get a lot of information record the most basic things that they need to know and how it relates to westward expansion. And so I created a gallery, walk off the causes, events and effects off the War of 18 12 and all I did was take information from the textbook, and I created individual posters. And on each poster, I either talked about a cause, an event or an effect of War of the War of 18 12 and I had illustrations on there. I had maps on the posters and some text that helped explain it, and one of the really great benefits of a gallery walk is, it helps to break up the information that students are learning into manageable chunks. Instead of reading through six or seven pages in your textbook, or even watching a long length video, students can read a short piece, a short amount of text. They can look at some images that help to represent that tax, and then they get some movement as they go from one station to the next to learn the next bit of information that they need to know. And studies have shown that when students are moving while they're learning, they learn better. They retain information more, and it just makes for a much more interactive experience for the students. The next way that you can make history come alive is to explore riel photographs with your students. Now, I know this is not gonna be possible for every topic that you teach, because anything pre 18 hundreds is not gonna have really photographs. But if you can, if you're teaching something like the Civil War or World War or World War Two or voting, then try to use photographs when you can. Using real photographs versus Clipper has a much stronger impact on the students retention of that topic. Students love to see what really people looked like in the past, and one of my favorite ways to start a new social studies unit is to have students work in small groups, looking through photographs that represent the time period that we're going to begin learning about. I have them discuss what they think is going on in each picture and what the people in the photo might be saying. It's a really great way to set up your unit and to get the students minds thinking about the topics and the information that they're going to be learning about in that new social studies unit. Allowing students to see real pictures from the past really helps him to visualize a period in history more accurately along those same lines. Another way to make history come alive in addition to really photographs is to use riel objects again. This is not gonna always be possible, depending on how far back in history you're teaching about, but if you can get your hands on old newspapers and artifacts that were used by people in the past, your students interest level is gonna go way up. Consider inviting experts or historians from different time periods in your classroom that may have access to these objects to share with your students. I know for myself that when we were talking about the Irigoyen Native Americans, we had a man come in who was a Native American and work for an organization that went to schools that would help teach students about their culture and about their history. And he brought in with him some objects that would really help students to understand their culture and their history. So really objects when you can use them in your classroom Another way, it's who make history come alive is to have students act out a specific event in history. Now you have to be a little sensitive to the specific event that you choose because not every single event in history that you teach your students about is going to be appropriate to act out and have your students pretend to be in that situation. But if it fits with what you're talking about, acting out, an event could really have a lasting effect on your students understanding of that particular time in history kind of along the same lines of acting out. A specific event in history is to have students participate in a simulation that makes them feel as though they were there. So, for example, I had a activity where students simulated being on the Oregon Trail and they had a game board out in front of them where they were traveling along from Landmark to landmark as they were traveling on the Oregon Trail. And they went through experiences like running out of food and someone in their family becoming sick or having to create a raft to cross a river that they came across and help students to kind of really understand what it was like for people to travel on the Oregon Trail as they moved westward. You could do a similar simulation activity for Ellis Island and immigration, or you could do one for the Salem Witch trials, and doing so will really help students to kind of see themselves in the history and visualize and feel what it was like to be a part of that time period. The next activity to help make history come alive is by far my favorite. Although I'm a little biased because I create them. But if you have not heard of Lincoln thanks. Oh, dear. Teacher friend, you are missing out, Lincoln thinks are in easy way for students to experience history through pictures, videos, text and images, all with the click of a button. If your brand new telling you thinks, let me just give you a quick overview. Essentially, Lincoln thinks our digital guides their provided in PdF Power Point or even in Google slides. You can assign them inside of your Google classroom, but they are digital guides were students. I can click on images and texts. They can go and watch videos, and it's all for them in one file. So they come to, Ah, home screen, and then they can click on different categories, and that category takes them to other slides within the file, and they can do it in any order. So you're not scrolling like you would normally in a pdf. Everything is hyper linked so that students could easily click around and navigate through the Lincoln Thing. If you've never done one with your student, I highly encourage that you give one a try. You can even grab a free Lincoln think that I've done for nonfiction text features. I know that's not history related, but it will give you an idea of how Lincoln things work, and I've put that free link and think in our Members Resource Library in the reading section again. All you gotta do is go to classroom nook dot com and up with the top. You'll see a link for the Members Resource Library and you get yourself set up and you can try out a Lincoln thing for free. And then you can kind of see how they work and how you might use them with your students. I have Lincoln Thanks for the American Revolution, for the Civil War, for the California Gold Rush. Colonial jobs, Native Americans, early European explorers. I have tons of Lincoln thinks that are great for social studies that you can use to help teach new content, and it's very easily differentiated. There's audio that students can use toe listen to the information that's being taught in the Lincoln Think definitely go check them out. If you haven't had a chance to do so yet, the next way you could make history come alive is using Videos on Studies Weekly. Now Studies Weekly is a YouTube channel that has videos for anything you can possibly a man it imagine as faras social studies and history goes, there's even some videos in Spanish, if that might be helpful to you and your students. They're short kid friendly video clips, and they're a perfect addition to the beginning of your lesson. To help introduce something. There's virtual field trips to places like the National World War One Museum, and there are stories of building the trans Continental railroad. There's so many to choose from, and they are constantly adding new ones, so make sure you check that out. I will link to their YouTube channel in the show. Notes at classroom look dot com forward slash podcasts for its last one. I think I've got two more ways to share with you here. Yup, two more ways, and the next one is to let students become experts. Everyone loves to feel like an expert right. Telling students that they're going to be an expert on a certain topic encourages students to take ownership of their learning. So if you're teaching about several battles from a specific war period, for example, or teaching new types of transportation and communication in the 18 hundreds. Divide students up into small groups and assign them each ah portion of the whole topic toe learn about and then present to the class. Students can present their learning by creating posters Ah, Power Point or Google Slides presentation or another type of presentation to the class. For example, one of the ways that I used this particular way to make history come alive is with the different types of transportation and communication that were developed during westward expansion time. And I gave one group, the National Road, and another group, the Transcontinental Railroad, and another group, the Pony Express in The Telegraph in the steam engine boat and all those things. And they created a group poster that talked about the travel problems that people were experiencing before their particular communication or transportation development was made, and the solutions that that particular transportation or communication solved four people of that time period. They talked about other facts and other challenges faced when developing this new transportation and communication, and then they presented it to there. The rest of the class and the rest of the class is able to fill out a graphic organizer from their peers, so it's great because they're working together as a group, and then they're also working on their presentation and speaking skills as they present it to the class. So there's a lot of skills that are being met there in allowing your students to become experts about one particular portion of a topic and then sharing it out to their classmates on the last way is another easy way to take textbook information and present it in a more kid friendly and interactive fashion. And they're called Discovery Learning Folders, and anybody can make these. I have a whole library of them myself out linked to them in the show notes. But you could easily create them. And what I mean by Discovery learning folders as you take a file folder and a textbook, and you kind of chunk out the information that you want to teach your students. For example, if you're teaching about the Native American regions of North America, you're going to create a Discovery Learning folder for each region, and you take the information from the text about that region. So information about the land, the shelter that was used in that region, the food that those Native Americans had access to the kinds of clothing that they wore, and you create either in Power Point or Microsoft Word. However you create resource is for your students. You type up information about the things that they need to know about that region in small chunks. You're gonna include lots of images and clip are, and you're gonna print out those sheets of information and glue them to the file folder. You can have up to three informational sheets that conglomerate A into the file folder. So you're gonna have a cover sheet on the outside so that one doesn't really count just a cover sheet that tells what region or whatever the topic is that being talked about in that Discovery Learning folder. Then when you open up the file folder, you can have an informational sheet on one side of the file folder and information she on the other side of the file folder. So, for me, with the Native Americans regions, as the students open up the file folder on the left hand side is information about the land and the shelter and just small in pieces of text and lots of images. And then on the other side of the file full, there is information about food and clothing. Then, on the back, I glued in another piece of paper where there was discussion questions or prompts for students to use when discussing the information learned in that folder so that the interaction is built right in. And it gives students a little bit of guidance for how to talk about that topic with their small group. And then they rotate to another folder so similar toothy gallery walk. The students are learning a little bit of information, taking down some notes, moving on to the next piece of information so they're not overwhelmed with a ton of information at once. And if you're having a hard time visualizing what the's learning folders look like, I will include some illustrations of ones that I've created to kind of give you an idea of how you would set this up using a file folder. It's really super simple. Anybody can do it, so I want to give you some visuals to help get you started, and I also have a library of Discovery learning folders already done for you and I will put a link to those in the show notes as well. So there you have a 10 ways to make history come alive with your students, and let's just run down through them one more time. The first way was Readers Theater. The second way was to create a gallery walk for a certain time period. The third was to explore really photographs. Four explore riel objects and artifacts. Five was to re enact events in history. Six simulations. Seven Lincoln Think Digital Learning guides eight Videos on studies weekly on YouTube. Nine. Let students become the experts and 10 Use Discovery Learning Folders. All of these ways can be adapted to fit into the curriculum that you're already currently using in your classroom. It's simply taking the information that your district and your state requires you to teach and presenting it to students in an interactive, kid friendly way that's going to resonate with them and help them to really learn that piece of information. So I know we covered a lot in this episode, so please head to the show notes for this episode at Classroom Nook dot com Florid slash podcast for its slash three And get all of the links to the resource is that I mentioned and be sure to sign up for the Free Members Resource Library, where you'll find tons of teacher resource is student Resource is and even some video tutorials that you can use in your classroom for all content areas. I hope you have a great rest of the week. Thanks for letting me carpool with you this week, and I hope that you'll join me again. Next. Take care.