Need to share it? Scoop it!

If you are like me, you have seen the incredibly addictive potential of Pinterest. It allows users to create different pinboards of interests, anything from home decor ideas to planning a wedding and viewing art, then "pin" links and images from the web onto a visually-appealing and easy-to-navigate board. So why am I talking about Pinterest?

I have recently discovered a similar tool, Scoop.it, that is formatted similarly to Pinterest, but it shares information, articles and sources instead of craft ideas or recipes. The posts are then organized into "magazines" instead of pinboards and the site even suggests similar sources of interest. While there is a paid subscription service available on Scoop.it, the free edition allows users to store up to five topic magazines.

You can train your students to use Scoop.it to do research and set up accounts for each student, or you can use it as a way to share your own magazines with students. Just like Twitter, Pinterest and other familiar social sharing sites, users can "follow" other users and get updates about their posts and topics. Your students can follow you and you may just find some other educators out there with similar interests to follow yourself!

Your magazines are user-friendly snippets with images instead of just lists of links. They function similar to Pinterest pinboards so some students may need less instruction on how to use them.

Image is from Seth Dixon's board entitled "History and Social Studies Education" for the Rhode Island College.

Breaking News!

Our textbook is pretty brief when it comes to describing the conquistadors and the tragic end of the Aztec and Inca empires. I wanted my students to have an opportunity to do more research and describe the events of the conquests in more detail. I decided to have them retell the story while also flexing their expository writing muscles.

With the newspaper template provided, I asked each small group to create a newspaper-like account of the events of the conquest, including pictures and some "direct quotes." (Clearly they would need to take some creative liberties here.) I gave them a checklist and grading rubric to follow and let them write.

When they were finished, we proofread the documents and printed them on 11" x 17" paper. Just for fun, we used teabags to "age" the paper to make an eye-catching display in the hallway.

I always love to get the kids writing about history, but opening up a blank word processing document can be daunting and unexciting for the kids. Writing is an important part of our interdisciplinary curriculum and I am always looking for new ways for them to express themselves in words.

Flipping on NPR!

As some of you may already be aware, I had the pleasure of presenting to a group of enthusiastic teachers a few weeks ago about the "flipped classroom" model. A few of my former colleagues and I were invited to give a presentation to teachers from cooperating schools in the Pennsylvania Association of Independent Schools on the basic tenets  of flipping, as well as some use-right-away strategies for integrating it into classrooms.




Imagine my surprise this afternoon to hear a story about flipped teaching during NPR's All Things Considered. Just like so many other technological innovations of the last two decades, the idea of flipping -- which was almost completely unknown just two or three years ago -- is gaining enough traction to be covered in a major news outlet!

So, to all you flippers out there, you are truly on the cutting edge of education, and people are really beginning to take notice!

Columbian Exchange Relay

It may be hard to believe, but before the massive exchange of goods and organisms during the post-Columbian era, many of the crops associated with certain areas simply were not there. Simply put,

"before the Columbian Exchange, there were no oranges in Florida, no bananas in Ecuador, no paprika in Hungary, no tomatoes in Italy, no potatoes in Ireland, no coffee in Columbia, no pineapples in Hawaii, no rubber trees in Africa, no cattle in Texas, no donkeys in Mexico, no chili peppers in Thailand or India, and no chocolate in Switzerland."[1]

In the Columbian Exchange, European explorers and settlers brought livestock, plants and goods to support their lifestyles, to trade with others and to set up farming operations conducive to the New World climate. Similarly, they brought back exotic new goods from the New World and later, farmed familiar products like sugarcane in a hospitable climate with slave labor for massive profits.

I wanted to present this cycle in a way that I knew the kids would remember, so I planned a relay activity. I did, however, also want to make sure to address the topic with the seriousness that it deserved, considering that slave labor and death from disease were tragic parts of this exchange. We discussed the exchange and read personal accounts in the day leading up to the relay, then performed the relay game only after we had studied and discussed it extensively.

At the beginning of the period, we watched a quick BrainPop video that summed up both the positive and negative effects of the centuries-long Columbian Exchange. We then found an empty hallway (or, if we were lucky, an empty room or gym) and set up the game.

I had two buckets, one labeled as the Old World (Europe, Asia and Africa) and one as the New World (North and South America). One bucket was placed just a few feet from the starting line and the second bucket was about 20 feet away. I made two sets of cards for the activity -- each with about 10 products from the Old World that were brought to the Americas and about 10 products that were brought from the Americas back to the Old World. I color-coded the cards on construction paper and laminated them for durability.

I scattered the two sets of blue "Old World" cards on either side of the Old World bucket, then scattered the red "New World" cards around the New World bucket. In a relay style, each team had to send one person at a time to collect a blue card, bring it to the New World bucket while calling out what it pictured, then grab a red card, bring it back to the Old World bucket, then tag up and send a new team member. We ran the activity twice, each round lasting about 3-5 minutes.

After the relay, we returned to the classroom and filled in some quick notes about the goods, ideas, animals and diseases exchanged during the game. I was impressed with how many items the students could recall after playing the game!

The Game of Life

While studying Native American cultures, we focused on four geographic regions and one culture for each. As a culminating assignment, I decided to have the kids create a board game, based on the "Game of Life" showing real-life situations and events in the everyday life of the Iroquois, Cheyenne, Hopi and Kwakiutl.

Most of the kids in class were already familiar with the basic workings of the classic Milton Bradley board game, so adapting it to simplified rules worked well for our class. I provided the students with a game board template and we devoted the first day to labeling the spaces on the board with realistic events. Students also created types of currency specific to their culture and region to replace the fake money used in the game.

You can find several great game board templates here.

As far as a grading rubric, I required that students fill the spaces with accurate and appropriate facts and life events and that they decorate the background with authentic scenery and objects, create a directions sheet, and make currency bills based on traded objects.

Even though each group was working with the same template, each game was unique. The students created different rules, different currencies and different situations. One of primary goals in teaching Native American cultures was to ensure that the students understood the diversity of environments and cultures. Many people assign various stereotypes to American Indian cultures or combine aspects from different cultures into one inaccurate perception. With these games, however, there was no question that the experience of being Hopi, Iroquois, Kwakiutl or Cheyenne were very distinct and that their environments and ways of life were tremendously different.

Encounter

We have all heard the story of Columbus's voyage from the European perspective, but what would it have looked like to the Taino? There are countless written records of the Spanish experience from journals and other accounts, but little remains of the Taino. They were virtually wiped out within 50 years of Columbus's arrival and many of their crafts and artifacts were either lost, destroyed, or in the case of gold objects, melted down to add to the royal Spanish coffers.

As a result, it is impossible to know exactly what their experience was like. Jane Yolen, however, the famous  author of young adult novels like The Devil's Arithmetic and several picture books, has researched the Taino and created her interpretation of what this first encounter must have been like. In the picture book Encounter, Yolen describes Columbus's arrival in the perspective of a young Taino boy.

Just as the Spanish described the strange customs, attire and appearance of the "Indians," Yolen's narrator makes the same observations of the "parrot-like" appearance, "pale moon" skin and bushy beards of the soon-to-be conquerors.

While most discussions of Columbus's discovery/exploration/devastation of the so-called West Indies are now more nuanced and include conversations about slavery, illness, greed and racism, few yet consider the viewpoint of the Taino. I have found that this book strikes a chord with students of all ages and I often use it to begin our discussion of Columbus and New Spain.

Many students used to wonder why American Indians behaved in the ways that they did in welcoming the strangers and making unwise trades and treaties for seemingly useless objects. This book, however, captures the wonder, custom, religion and even some greedy desire on the side of the Taino and represents them not as naive and child-like as so many accounts do, but as victims with their own beliefs and agendas.

The story is short and relatively simple and makes for a good introductory read-aloud for students of all ages. The discussions that arise from the text and the widened perspective that results are much more complex and valuable. The kids really enjoy reading literature, particularly outside the usual material, so I highly recommend using books like this to expand the conversations in your classroom.

Teaching Thanksgiving (with Meaning)

So it's almost Thanksgiving and you have one of those shortened weeks burdened with play practice and pressure to keep the homework load to a minimum. Several kids will miss class due to family travel and so you are looking for a low-stakes but meaningful activity to discuss Thanksgiving. The kids have been making paper pilgrim hats since they were in kindergarten, so what is there to do?

Here are a few ideas, some of which I will be trying with my students over the coming days:

Thanksgiving Placemats
The reality is that Thanksgiving day pretty much entirely revolves around the food. Why not bring the facts and meaningful conversation to the food?

Students can use either Microsoft Word or Publisher to design a placemat on 11" x 17" paper. They can include authentic pictures and facts, as well as thought-provoking discussion questions for conversation at the dinner table. Most  larger color laser printers will accommodate this size paper, so you can print a set of four placemats for each student. Finally, they can be made even more durable with a quick run through the laminator.

Two Thanksgivings
It just so happens that our study of Native American cultures perfectly aligned with the Thanksgiving holiday this year. I wanted to make sure we addressed the historical and cultural aspects of the holiday before launching into the five-day weekend.

In the past, I have written about using text-rendered poems as a tool for summarizing and capturing main ideas. I decided to have the students read two different perspectives of the Thanksgiving story and create a text-rendered poem of each. The catch was that each of the two groups were unknowingly reading two different stories. At the end of class, they presented their poems and discussed the differences between the stories. Both were a little extreme, one from a very positive, traditional perspective and the other from a very negative, more controversial perspective.

So what's the truth? Perhaps it's not possible to really know. There are certainly tragic elements to the story, but there is also that original unity of different cultures. We cannot know which message was truly in the hearts of those figures in history who promoted and promulgated the holiday, so I left it to the students. What will you celebrate when you sit down to Thanksgiving dinner? What should you remember? How should you recognize the tragedy while also celebrating the message of thanks and unity?

- - - - - -
For our positive interpretation, I used History.com's Thanksgiving at Plymouth article from their website. For the less cheery perspective, I used Susan Bates's The Real Story of Thanksgiving. There are plenty of sources out there, however, so it is easy to find two stories that suit the ability levels and readiness of your group. Bates's story does include some violent descriptions, so teachers of younger readers may want to look for something more age appropriate.