Miss G's Social Studies Blog

Lesson #6 was the last lesson with this group of fourth graders and was focused mainly on advocacy. To begin this lesson Miss. Karlie and I decided to create individual awards for each of the students and pass each one out to recognize each of the students hard work. Each award was different and given to the students based on what they did well during each of the six lessons. The students enjoyed receiving these awards and were excited to find out that they were able to take them home with them. After each award was passed out, we then went over our list of learning expectations so the students were reminded of what was expected during the lesson. For this last week we had six new vocabulary words added to the students' word chains. To make sure that each student got a good understanding of the words and their definitions we did a sorting activity with visuals that represented each of the vocabulary words. It ended up taking the students less time than usual to match these pictures...

Included in each of the five lessons taught were primary sources for the students to analyze. Each of these primary sources were taken from the Library Of Congress, this helped the students develop a deeper understanding of the focus of each lesson. Instead of having the students look at a primary source and not know what to do with it, Miss. Karlie and I always included a fun activity to get the students thinking. Included in our first lesson was a primary source of a map of France. The students had to jot down what they knew, saw, and wondered about the map. After many questions and realizations, a group discussion was created and got each of the students highly engaged. Included in one of our lessons we also did a matching activity to get the students to better understand the difference between primary and secondary sources.  In one of our lessons, we gave the students a primary source to look at and we completed a game of hide and seek pretending to put ourselves in the picture...

Lesson #5 was focused on culture specific to France. Our students looked at what France culture is compared to our own culture and specific traditions our students have. We started off the lesson with a quick icebreaker called " find someone who." The students had a sheet of paper with prompts to help find someone who has been on a boat, has seven letters in their name, has an older brother etc. This community building activity really helped get the lesson moving and the students enjoyed asking their peers and teachers questions. We then moved on to reviewing the behavior expectations that were created during the first lesson. After reviewing the behavior expectations we then moved onto our five new vocabulary words that were added to the students vocabulary rings. Miss. Karlie and I reviewed each of the vocab words and their definitions so that each student had a good understanding before moving onto a vocab matching activity that us teachers had created. Miss. Karlie and I ...

Lesson 4 focused on economics and its importance within the country France. The lesson started off with a couple of would you rather questions reflecting the topic of economics. An example question was "would you rather have a high paying job that you don't like or a job that you love that pays just enough to cover expenses?" The students used hand signals to engage and show their answers by putting up one or two fingers. Following our icebreaker teacher candidates and students went over the learning expectations that we had created as a group during lesson 1. This lesson had a lot of vocabulary words included so Miss. Karlie and I decided to create an interactive chart for the students to match pictures to it's definition. Each of the students also had these vocabulary words attached to their word rings and they were in the color yellow for easy access. Next, the students were shown a primary source from the Library Of Congress. The primary source was a picture of a ...