Living history museum

Next week we are going to do an activity called Living Museum. Everyone has to pick an important person in history and act like them.  I have chosen to be Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman to be seated on the supreme court. She was elected in 1981, the next female supreme court justice was not apointed until 1993.  I am anxious for Monday's class to see how our museum unfolds. 

Book Talks

This week in social studies we all had a to give a book talk.  Earlier on in the semester we all had to choose a chapter book to read during the semester.  I chose to read Esperanza Rising.  I really enjoyed this book. The story was easy to read and follow.  This would be a great multicultural book for middle school students.  Through the book talk session I able to preview many other books wich I can use in my future classroom.  I am not a big reader, however I enjoyed being pushed outside of my box.  In order to be a good teachers I need to be aware of what books are out there for my students to read.  I also need to know what books my students should not read! 

Story path shines

This week in social studies we worked on a storypath.  We spent one day learning about Mount
Everest and the many different positive and negative aspects of the expeditions that occur there.  On the second day we all created our own character and created a climbing scenario.  We created the mountain, camps, supplies, climbers and the skyline.  This was a neat way to give everyone the ability to create themselves into a character for the story.  We were able to choose between climber or sherpa.  After we designed our characters we designed posters to represent our purpose for being on the mountain.  There were many reasons such as money, thrill, livelyhood, and cleaning crew.  This will be a great activity for students in the classroom.  This allowed us to have a more hands on learning experiance which all students need more of.  I plan on implementing storypaths into my curriculum.  :)

Photo Diaries

This past week we went over photo diaries in class.  We all had to take pictures and relate them to our teaching strategies in social studies.  At first I though this was going to be a horrible assignment because you had to think outside the box. I am not typically the kind of person who thinks outside the box, so I was a litttle nervous.  However I loved the assignment.  I really enjoyed having to think of ways to express myself through pictures.  It was also really enjoyable to see how others in my class expressed themselves.  I can see how using a photo diary could work well in a classroom setting.  Having your students work together to create such a project could be a great way to teach social studies or other subjects.  I hope to find ways to icnorporate this into my classrroom.  Only if I survive block first!!!