Blackout Poetry with a Social Studies Twist
Students will demonstrate an understanding of historical texts by creating a blackout poetry version of it.
Piece History Together to Review a Unit
Students will put together puzzles of images from any history unit to review what they learned.
An Easy Way to Encourage Higher Level Thinking
One of my favorite (and quick) ways to get students to do some higher level thinking without realizing it is a game I call, “What Doesn’t Belong and Why?” I typically use this as a thematic or unit review so that students have the academic knowledge to flesh […]
My Favorite Bell Ringer Prompts and Ideas
Disclaimer: I know bell ringers and exit tickets aren’t for everyone. I started my teaching career not using them and now they are part of my middle school and on-level high school routine (for time reasons I don’t use them in APUSH). My first year teaching I wasn’t […]
My Go-To Secondary Friendly Debate Prompts
My students love debating each other, LOVE it. However, they usually need practice at the start of the year defending their stance, especially if they’re middle schoolers or freshmen. Too many times I’ve heard, “because I said so,” or in an academic debate they don’t use the right […]
One of My Favorite Distance Learning Resources
Have you heard of Symbaloo yet? I learned about it this past school year from our librarian and I love it!!! Symbaloo is a website that allows you to save and organize websites into clickable boxes. You can then email your students the link to the specific Symbaloo for […]
A Point of View Activity that’s Sure to be a Hit!
My classroom is a primary source heavy classroom. Sometimes we read through sources and analyze them together, sometimes my kids do it in small groups or pairs, at other times it’s an individual effort, and sometimes I even break the readings up and girls complete different tasks for […]
5 Favorite Ways to Use Whiteboards in Social Studies
After years of thinking about it, this summer I finally bought a set of classroom white boards (my largest class is 22 this year so it wasn’t cost prohibitive). Instead of wasting paper and prep time on my end, this year a lot of my quick warm up […]
A “Just the Facts” Social Studies Project
As teachers, no matter the content area, we frequently find ourselves with too much to teach and not enough time to teach it all sufficiently. That is definitely the case in my 6th grade World Geography class, so when we got to sub-Saharan Africa, I had to get creative […]
Reinforcing Social Studies Skills–Timelines
I don’t make my kids memorize dates for every single event. I do need them to know the Civil War happened before WW2, that JFK was a president after FDR, and for our curriculum that the XYZ Affair happened during Adams’ presidency, but I don’t expect them to […]
