Project Based Learning

Let me start off by getting something off of my chest. I have seen a lot of talk on Instagram and Periscope (which I love both and love communicating with other teachers) about making sure that you are a maker not a taker. 5th grade where I teach is not departmentalized, so I teach math, reading, writing, science, social studies and on top of that tier 3 reading and tier 2 math. That is a LOT of planning and I don't have a lot of time. So if I see something awesome on Instagram, Periscope or someones blog I'm going to use it, right? That's why teachers share isn't it? 
What I am about to write about was not my original idea (I wish I was clever enough to come up with this) it came from Teaching With a Mountain View.  When I began learning about PBL I knew that this idea was one that could easily be adapted to fit my students needs from year to year and one that they would LOVE. 

Like you've heard me say before, I love teaching social studies and the Revolutionary War but sometimes life can get too routine in 5th grade and we have to spice things up a bit. This is where our magazines came into play. We had spent about a week looking at the different text structures of informational text as well as text features and we were finished with our American Revolution unit. Then came in the fun part. Our Principal came to us looking for some help. She wanted to add some cool student work to our website and knew we could handle the job. She didn't care what it was, just something to add to the website for parents to look at. 

Once she left, my students began a Know and Need to Know List. What did they know about what our principal wanted and what did they need to know about what she wanted. They then began sharing ideas and with some sneaky leading from me my students decided they wanted to create magazines about The Revolutionary War. To get my kids to this point I showed them the blog post from Teaching With a Mountain View so they could get some ideas about what they wanted to do.  I used the planning sheet that can be found on the original post for my students to begin planning their magazine. To make this idea work for my class and my students I made a few changes to the planning sheet. I had about 5 kids who had to complete all of the aspects of the project. 4 who only had to do 3 articles and then a group of 3 students who worked together and a pair of students who worked together. I knew this would work better with the time frame that we were working with and the quality of work I expected for my students.  After my students had planned their magazine articles we spent some time as a class deciding how long this would take us and how we would make sure to get this project done in time. From the Buck Institute I found this awesome project planner. This allowed my students to plan out from day to day what they wanted to get done on their magazine to meet the deadline. I have found that with a project this big planning each day and setting goals was very helpful to keep us on track. You can click on the image below to get your own copy of the project calendar. Buck Institute also has a ton of free PBL resources as well. 

Then it came down to the student work. Students spent time writing rough drafts of their articles, and then typed them all on a Google Doc to upload to our Google Classroom website. This made it so easy for me to give feedback to students when I got to school in the morning or each night. Google Classroom really kept our project flowing nicely and students were able to have independence on what steps to take next on their project. 

Students set their own goals daily and moved at their own pace. After I gave the OK on all of their magazine articles, they then moved on to creating their Magazines. We started off using the website MadMagz but quickly found that it wasn't as user friendly as I first though. Then we quickly moved to FlipSnack. As students began working on putting their magazine together I met with them in small groups to give them a quick tutorial on how to use the website, but they quickly became experts themselves. One tip I do have for Flipsnack is to have your students all use one account, I did not do this and now we will be unable to print all of our magazines because the premium account costs $36. 

As students began to 'be finished' I had them look over their rubric to make sure they had met all of the criteria to get a 4 on their magazine. This sent several students back to work to make sure their magazine was the best it could be. 

I am so impressed with the final products that my students came up with. Even though this project took longer than we had planned it freed up time in social studies because we could move on to a new topic while still learning about the American Revolution. They were able to show their understanding of text features and structures through their informational writing, and my students were helping our principal along the way. Once we were all finished we held a gallery walk in our computer lab for all of the students to share their work with the rest of the school. You could not imagine how excited they were to show off their hard work. 

You can click here to look at one of my students magazines. She went above and beyond the call of duty to make this magazine what she wanted it to be. 
I have found that by empowering my students and giving them an actual purpose for projects gives them the drive that they need to complete such large tasks. Several times during our project students wanted to quit, but as I reminded them about why we were competing the projects they changed their mind because they did not want to let our principal down. 
If you have any questions about this PBL feel free to e-mail me. I cannot explain how much my students loved this project and the valuable knowledge they gained through the process! 

American Revolution {Part Two}

When I said that teaching about the American Revolution was my favorite subject ever, I wasn't kidding. We have been at it for a few weeks now and it is finally coming to an end (insert sad face).  I find that making social studies engaging can be hard, so for this unit I really pushed myself to find some out of the box ideas. While searching the web I found some wonderful teacher bloggers who have the same love of teaching the American Revolution as I do, and I knew I had to take their lead. 

While pursuing Pinterest I found an activity about Paul Revere that I knew I had to do. Stephanie from Teaching in Room 6   had a great lesson idea for teaching the myths that surround Paul Revere and that midnight ride. During our reading unit where we discuss multimedia and the tone and beauty of a text my students read part of the poem "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and go on a online ride along side Mr. Revere. Later on during our Revolutionary War unit we read the entire poem along side a letter from Mr. Revere himself to displace the myths from that ride. 

For my students I knew that I had to do some differentiation. For my higher kids, I had them read the original version of the poem as well as the letter from Paul Revere.  For some of my other students I knew that the abridged versions would be great. I divided my students and had them read either the poem or the letter. Then, students partnered up to discuss the differences and similarities in the accounts. While they were discussing they were to record the myths and facts from that night. We then got together to create our own anchor chart. If you are interested in this resource you can grab it in my store for $1. 

When we learned about the Boston Tea Party we had an actual tea party. While I read the "The Boston Tea Party" by Russell  Freemand my students enjoyed glasses of sweet tea. We also listened to "The Boston Tea Party Song." My plan was to tea paper with my students to use as journal entry pages for an exit slip, but snow days got in the way and google classroom had to take its place. If you are interested in the Boston Tea Party exit slip that is below, click here. You can choose to print it for students or upload it on to google classroom. 

Finally, to sum it all up we are working on a Project Based Learning experiences to show our knowledge of the American Revolution, informational writing, informational text structures and text features. More information coming about this! 

I hope that you can engage your students with some of these activities and spread the love of the American Revolution to your students. 

The American Revolution in Upper Grades {Part One}

I love teaching the American Revolution. It is by far my favorite thing to teach when it comes to Social Studies. I just love to see how our country fought for their freedom. Now, even though I love to teach the American Revolution, it is not easy to teach. I have found that my kids don't know that much about the topic and that seems to slow us down. That is why I have been working hard this year to #setthestagetoengage when it comes to this topic and let me tell you there are some AMAZING things out there that helped me. 

Let me start off with how I address my students lack of schema when it comes to social studies in general. Meet the schema box. This is where I pull tons of books from our school library (which I might add we have a pretty awesome librarian who helps me) that have to do with our current social studies topic. My students can pull from this box whenever they want to. I have found that this helps my students feel more confident in social studies because they can actually make some connections about what we are learning. I have also found that if I add some books about our next topic students begin to make connections between events. 

Another helpful resource that I have for the American Revolution is the pack from Collaboration Cuties. I have been using this in my classroom as morning work for students to build schema on the topics that we will be discussing each day in social studies. The kids really love the flippables that they can use in their interactive notebook. By building schema before the lesson, we are able to dig deeper into events during our social studies block. 

We begin our unit on the French and Indian war, which leads into the Stamp Act. If you are interested in a exit slip for the French and Indian War I have one here and here. Before students can really understand the Stamp Act the have to put themselves in the shoes of a colonists. In years past I've done the lesson where one student is the king and he makes students pay taxes based off of rules he passes. This year, I found an awesome resource by Kristine Nanini and the best part of all, it was FREE. My students got so upset when they had to give up their m&m's to the king and they got even more upset when some of them had more m&m's than others when it was all over. This lesson was so much more meaningful to my students than if I would have told them how angry the colonists were. 

After this lesson, students read more about The Stamp Act, and added this event into their timeline in their social studies notebook. Then they were assigned the task to create a political cartoon depicting The Stamp Act. They loved this activity and it was a great assessment for me to see who know knew what The Stamp Act really was. 

  If you are interested the rubric used to grade this assignment you can grab it here for free! 

Up next was the Boston Massacre and this is my favorite topic to discuss during this unit. So much happened leading up to the Boston Massacre and after it was over. I wanted to do something engaging with this event so I immediately searched Pinterest.  My search led me to a blog that I had never seen before, but quickly became one of my favorites. To Engage Them All has so many wonderful engaging activities for students. Immediately I knew that I had to do the crime scene lesson for my students. Kara has everything that you need for his lesson ready to go and guess what, its FREE! You can't go wrong with awesomely engaging free lessons for social studies. This lesson was a HUGE hit in my class. I even heard some of my students who don't usually like social studies talking about how much fun this was.  I will have to say that this lesson was made for 8th grade students and I did make some changes to the detective guide for my 5th graders.  I set up the crime scene before school so my kiddos had time to stew over what could have happened in our classroom. They couldn't wait for social studies to see what had happened. 

This is just the beginning of our American Revolution. Come back next week to join our tea party and midnight ride with Paul Revere.