Martians attack

I worked with 3 of my peers to create an innovative lesson plan that reflected an integrated curriculum. Our focus was on devising a Cross-curricular lesson that had a creative Minds On to peak our students' interest. We chose 3 subjects to focus on, Social Studies, Language Arts, and Drama, for grade 6 students. We wanted to introduce the students to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and talk about FNMI, which fits in well with the grade 6 curriculum.

Our first idea was to have create anonymous profiles for the students to portray and have them do a Privilege Walk Activity as their new character. We chose 2 FNMI people to base the profiles off of and 2 non-natives. The students would do the privilege walk in their table groups on a game board and afterward they would find out who their character actually was. The idea was to have students see how underprivileged FMNI people are and how poorly they have been treated. Unfortunately, we decided that we did not want to focus too much on privilege because our big idea was why might different groups experience the same development or event in different ways? We had to scrap that idea and came up with the idea that fit into the Drama curriculum; students would still get anonymous profiles to read, but they would also be given a scenario to act out in a group based on their character. The character profiles were created based on people involved in the Residential Schools. However, to put a twist on this activity, we decided that instead of telling the students we were focusing on the Residential Schools, we had the students image that Martians had taken over Earth and were trying to assimilate Earthlings to Martian cultures. After the students acted out their characters as either and Earthling or a Martian we revealed who each profile actually was on the following slideshow:

When we presented this activity to our peers, they thought it was a great idea, which is what we had hoped for. We received a lot of good feedback as well, which I found extremely helpful. Some of our peers suggested that we could use this activity and relate it to both historical or current events. For example instead of Residential Schools the Martians could be the Nazis during WWII or a more current event like the Syrian refugees. I think this was a great suggestion because as a teacher you can use the activity for various events to get students thinking and get a discussion going.

Overall, I think my peers and I collaborated well together to create an innovative lesson that focused on more than one curriculum subject. I really like the idea of an integrated curriculum to show students how everything is connected and this was an interesting concept to implement in this lesson plan. I plan to relate many of my lessons to events that students can relate to and make connections to other curriculum subjects.

 View the full lesson here.

Introduction

Welcome to my blog for Social Studies. I'm excited to learn more about this subject, especially since it is one of those school subjects that people look over. There are so many different topics to get to know including History, Geography, Civics, and Social Studies, and all the strands within these topics. I'm interested to see what this course has in store.

There have been many changes to the curriculum document since I was in elementary school, for example social studies is now divided into grades and not strands, and there are overview pages for each grade. The thing that stands out to me the most amongst all the changes is the emphasis on inquiry. When I was a student, we would read from the textbook and fill in worksheets or answer questions. I was always pretty bored with History/geography/social studies because it was uninteresting to do so much busywork. Applying inquiry skills will definitely get students interested in these subjects and they will be engaged unlike I was.

 

This video is a shows how to get students involved in their own learning, rather than being told what to do. I plan to help my students become more engaged in the classroom by having many inquiry-based lessons. I also plan to become involved with current events on the news so that I can connect my lessons to real-world events. This will help my students make connections of their own and will hopefully become interested in what they are learning. I hope to be passionate and enthusiastic about the topics I teach so that my students will follow my lead.