Week 4

This week's reading was chapter 7 of Black Ants and Buddhists. The title of this chapter is "Teaching history so children will care." After reading this chapter, it makes me look back and reflect on the social studies lessons I have done in the classroom this school year. I am student teaching in a first-grade classroom, and this semester is when we are starting to discuss people and events in history. Last semester was focused on citizenship, communities, maps, etc., but this semester is when we really start to look at the past. So far we have done lessons about Martin Luther King Jr. for MLK Day, and we spent a week talking about presidents (we learned about George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Donald Trump.) As I look back on these lessons, I am disappointed about the creativity and effort that went into the preparation and implementation of the material. We would begin our Social Studies time by watching a video on YouTube about the person we were learning about. After the video, we would sit in a circle on the carpet and discuss what facts the students learned in the video and their thoughts about that historical figure. Then we would make an anchor chart with the facts we believed to be most important. We also had flip books the students colored, cut out, and stapled together that had pictures and facts about the historical figure. These lessons were not engaging for the students. What I learned from chapter 7 of Black Ants and Buddhists was that students will learn new information from history lessons best when they are able to relate with the material. Thomas, one of the students from the chapter, was able to relate the information he learned about slavery to a new topic months after the initial lesson. I bet, in 2 months, my students will not be able to give you a detailed description of who Abraham Lincoln is and what he did for the country. My goal for the future is to plan engaging, relatable history lessons so that my students will create an accurate foundation of history lessons for them to build off of in later grades.