The Teaching of Social Studies
Using the Standards
The Mississippi Social Studies Frameworks leave a lot of wiggle room in a subject area that is not state tested. As my students are seniors and getting ready to enter the adult world of college and career, I have made special efforts to increase their literacy over the course of this year. Part of that literacy was focusing on the CCSS for Social Studies, which include a heavy emphasis on reading, writing, and reasoning with primary source materials. Another part of that literacy, as a Government teacher, was focusing on Citizenship skills and what it means to be a good citizen. As a final project at the end of the semester before their exam, students first learned about citizenship, what it entails, how it is obtained, and took a Citizenship Test (some even passed!). Students then recalled how various government officials respond to citizens' concerns and brainstormed issues that needed government attention. These ranged from concern over police brutality in Ferguson and New York City to a lack of street lights in different neighborhoods in Meridian. Whatever the specific concern, students used their knowledge of government and good citizenship to write letters to the government representatives who could potentially help with their concerns.
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Working with Primary SourcesIn Government class, students integrates primary sources into the lesson almost every day. The ultimate primary source--The Constitution--was referenced weekly, if not daily, in this class. My students completed a number of activities to grapple with the material of historical sources: they filled in graphic organizers to break down the Declaration of Independence as they read it in pairs, they created Bill of Rights Booklets to help remember the first ten amendments to the Constitution, and they analyzed John F. Kennedy's civil rights address on the eve of students integrating the University of Alabama, just to name a few.
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Fitting in Technology
Technology is a hard thing to come by at Meridian High School. With only three computer labs for over 60 teachers and first priority given to teachers who are state tested, I consider myself lucky to have reserved one of the labs all day on two separate occasions for my Economics students. In those class periods, my students completed two different research Web Quests that helped inform other work we were doing at the time. The first activity was about Economic Systems. The day before we made foldables for the four types of economic system--the students used their lab time to research some specific country examples that fell into each category. The second activity was about Poverty in America, specifically Child Poverty. It was used to help introduce our unit on government assistance, providing the students with some contextual background knowledge so all students could be on the same page.
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