This video, from the Auburn Early Education Center, AL, shows examples of using digital tools, such as whiteboards, to encourage very young students to develop their own projects and to weave the use of electronics and the internet in with "real world" classroom activities.
Ed Ayers, Peter Onuf, and Brian Balogh look at changing interpretations of the Declaration of Independence and the origins of Independence Day celebrations.
In a recent post I argued the importance of both history and technology in primary grades. I also made the case that both are significant challenges for teachers of young children for a variety of reasons. However, I’m a firm believer that we can do anything we think is important.
Moving to first grade from upper elementary grades meant that I had to think carefully about the technology I used. Some technology carried over quite nicely. I have an interactive whiteboard in my classroom. When we explored timelines we used it to look at one year in a variety of ways and to show timelines from a wonderful, but very small, book. While we record most of our thinking on chart paper we can hang up around the room to reread and refer back to, the interactive whiteboard allows children to manipulate items and ideas. We’ve also used ours to sort images into categories or chronological order.
Another use of technology I continue with in first grade is movie making. Sometimes we use still pictures and sometimes we take video. One example with still pictures is a movie about our responsibilities for school. A large part of the social studies curriculum in the early grades is based around helping students understand their community and their role in it. At our school we have a Home-School Compact for Learning. In order to better understand the students’ responsibilities we created a video with still pictures and with video. I have slowly collected a few digital cameras and a few Flip video cameras. I carry one of each around with me at all times so that I can quickly capture anything that catches my attention during the school day. Other cameras are on lanyards for students to wear around their neck when using them.
First graders in Virginia also learn about the difference between past and present. It is great fun to look at pictures of the past (especially schools, transportation, and daily life) and then send small groups of first graders off with a camera to capture images to contrast with the past. We can then put those into Windows Movie Maker or Photo Story to create a video explaining past and present.
As the year is progressing and my students are gaining literacy skills, I’m introducing them to Wallwisher. This free site allows me to create a wall with a question or topic and my students can add Post-It like items with their thoughts. As they are working around the classroom exploring a topic they can head to our interactive whiteboard to add their thinking. I can also place the wall on our class blog for students to come back to or to add more thoughts. The structure is set for brief writing, which is comforting to young children. It is a great way for us to record our learning and return to it later.
These different options for technology use offer opportunities for presenting information, processing learning, and sharing our thinking. In my next post I’ll explore my favorite, free, online tool in detail.
Read part one of Jennifer Orr's look at technology in early elementary classrooms, and then see what she has to say on other tricky topics in primary-level teaching in her entries on teaching Thanksgiving and Columbus Day.
For an introduction to Web 2.0 tools like those Orr mentions, browse our Tech for Teachers section. Learn about whiteboards, document cameras, digital storytelling software, and other tools.
This site was designed as a resource for teachers and students of Civics, grades K-12, in Michigan public schools. The site provides access to 118 primary source documents and links to 71 related sites. Of these documents, 22 are speeches, 34 are photographs or paintings, and five are maps. The site is indexed by subject and "core democratic values" as determined by Michigan Curriculum Framework. A section for teachers includes one syllabi each for primary, middle, and high school courses. The syllabi are accompanied by interviews with the teacher who developed the assignments and by a student who participated in the curriculum, as well as by examples of student work. "Adventures in Civics" presents student visitors with a 178-word essay on Elian Gonzalez and an essay assignment for each grade level on what it means to be an American. The site links to six articles and 17 sites about Gonzalez.
Students may use a multimedia library, simultaneously searchable by era, grade-level, and core democratic value. The site also provides a timeline of American history with 163 entries (five to 500-words). The site provides a 1,000-word explanation of core democratic values and links to 41 other government and university sites about American history and civics. This site will probably be most interesting and useful for teachers looking for curriculum ideas.
Memorial Day, formerly called Decoration Day, is a day of remembrance for those who have died in the service of the country. Materials for educators are plentiful.
At the Smithsonian Museum of American History, the exhibit The Price of Freedom: Americans at War looks at the history of America's military from the French and Indian Wars to the present military action in Iraq. Resources include a teacher's manual, worksheets and images for classroom use.
The Library of Congress summarizes the history of Memorial Day and provides links to related resources. Also at the Library of Congress: the Veterans History Project, a dynamic archive and exhibit site, collects and preserves audiovisual materials, oral histories, diaries and letters, artifacts, and other personal accounts of America's veterans from World War I to the present. This rich primary source site offers ideas on how to initiate veteran's oral history projects.
Education World lists five classroom activities for Memorial Day applicable for grades K-12.
The Gilder Lehrman Institutepresents an online exhibition of letters and audio, Battle Lines: Letters from America's Wars. These primary source materials cover more than 200 years of American history, from the Revolutionary War to the present. Materials are divided into chapters: Enlisting, Comforts of Home, Love, Combat, and The End of War.
I like to scrapbook. How can I incorporate this craft into an elementary classroom (Grades 2-5)?
Making scrapbook pages can be a fun activity for students in the elementary grades. You will want to help students understand that, in this case, a scrapbook—like all history—uses pieces of the past to tell a story. Students can make their own scrapbook pages that tell a story and these pages, when bound together, can tell a larger story or multiple stories about the same theme, historical event, or era.
Students could construct pages that tell family history or pages that focus on an historical figure like George Washington, Elizabeth Cady Stanton or César Chávez. Such scrapbooks might integrate photos, portraits, maps, timelines, and age-appropriate primary documents. Another option for scrapbooking is to examine a topic related to local history. Students might construct pages about historic sites in their own community, including important buildings, parks, and graveyards, pages about people from the past who made a difference in their local areas, or pages about daily life in the past. These pages could be bound together and used as a resource for future activities like writing a town history. Naturally, you will want to tailor the assignment’s topic and requirements to the particular age-group that you’re working with, asking older students to use more materials and craft more complete and clear narratives.
You’ll want to guide students in terms of what their scrapbooks should include. First, you’ll want to help students understand the kinds of sources they should use. Have a conversation with them about where they might gather the ingredients for a scrapbook page, and consider working with your school librarian to ensure that students have the necessary materials they will need to tell their story—photos and pictures from the internet, old newspapers and magazines, etc. You will also want to help students understand that a scrapbook, like all history, uses pieces of the past to tell a story. Selecting and ordering their materials chronologically, by theme, or in some other manner, will affect the nature of their narrative—and they’ll want to consider this when choosing sources to paste on their page. Consider if you will require specific sources, for example, will they need to include a map? Two photographs?
Students will need coaching in creating titles for their pages and captions for the “scraps” they include on that page. Remind them to use details in those captions and include information about names, dates, and places. Again, consider your students’ abilities in deciding what prose will be required in the assignment, and the choices (e.g., page title) you will leave to them and the choices you will make for them. Your experience with creating scrapbook pages will likely make it easy for you to model how you plan your page and what finished pages look like. This kind of modeling is always helpful for students. We also recommend using the creation of scrapbook pages as a prewriting or presentation assignment, where they put into words the story they have created on their page.
Scrapbooking, in short, can be a useful tool in the history classroom, as long as you take the time to create assignments that focus on understanding the past. Teaching opportunities in the activity include students learning more about the use and selection of evidence to tell a story, and cultivating a deeper understanding of primary sources and the specific historical stories they illustrate. Be sure to define your learning objectives thoughtfully so it is an activity with significant purpose. Try this backwards design model for planning, where those objectives determine the specific shape and nature of the activity that you design.