Chapter 4

This chapter is about teaching strategies for social studies in the elementary grade levels. I liked the images of the learning activities repository and of the instructional strategies circle web. These give great ideas for teachers to use different activities and strategies for teaching social studies. I could see myself using these strategies for teaching social studies, but also adapting some of them to teach other subjects as well. The art of questioning diagram was a nice visual to represent what a teacher centered classroom vs. a student centered classroom would look like in terms of questions. The other section I liked was the deductive and inductive ways of thinking. In science, most of us use inductive thinking where you have to think of a hypothesis and then build facts and knowledge onto that based on experiments. I think teaching students about these two ways of thinking would be a good way to challenge students to think about a topic in a different way. These two ways allow students to look at topics from a different point of view and allows students to collaboratively work and think about how events connect to one another.

Chapter 3

Chapter 3 is about lesson planning for social studies classes in the elementary grades. This chapter went in depth on Bloom's taxonomy and how each of the levels should be used when teaching social studies. I liked the chart in our notes that showed the percentage of retention based on the type of classroom activity was going on. This really shows how important it is to be using the top layers in Bloom's taxonomy. Also noted in this chapter was the head, hands, heart model. When teaching social studies, teachers need to keep in mind all three of these aspects when it comes to learning. Students need to engage in the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor areas of each topic discussed. When I begin teaching social studies I need to be able to balance out these three areas so students aren't primarily doing only one of the three. Overall, social studies teachers need to balance out mode of instruction based on Bloom's taxonomy for difficulty levels, as well as head, hands, and heart so students are able to not only know the cognitive sides of the topic, but the affective and psychomotor aspects as well.

Chapter 2

Chapter two is all about the standards used when teaching social studies. Common Core has recently been implemented primarily for language arts and mathematics. Social Studies uses ISBE state standards and the National Curriculum Standards when teaching within Illinois. A small portion of the language arts Common Core standards are dedicated to literacy of historical documents and other sub topics of social studies. As I am training to become a teacher at the K-9 grade range, I find social studies standards to be confusing because there are so many different groups of standards. Also these standards can be vague so that teachers teaching the material in different schools may interpret the standard in a completely different way. I do like how ISBE has the different documents for each sub topic for social studies. I will find this helpful in the future when creating lesson plans. If I am wanting to do a history lesson, I can easily find the grouping of standards by looking up the history document from their website.

Chapter 1

Chapter one touched on the different domains, taxonomies, and frameworks when teaching elementary students. Three of the domains referred to head-heart-hands. Head is in reference to Bloom's Taxonomy which is the cognitive domain. Heart is in reference to Krathwohl's Taxonomy on the affective domain. Lastly, hands is in reference to the psychomotor domain. Teachers need to keep in mind all three of these domains when creating lesson plans. In order for students to really understand the given topic, students must experience each of these three domains so that they are thinking, feeling, and producing throughout the learning process.

This chapter also goes into the different models associated with lessons. I really liked Hunter's Mastery Learning, Karplus and Their's 5-E Model, and Gardner's Multiple Intelligences. Hunter's Mastery Learning goes over a skeleton version of a lesson plan. This shows the different aspects that should be included in lesson plans. I also found the 5-E model to be interesting. I have never seen this model before. This model is: Engage, Explore, Explain, Extend, and Evaluate. This is a nice way to remember how the basic outline of lessons should be. Students need to be engaged in the beginning of the lesson, students need to explore the new topic, explain what is happening with the new topic, extend their knowledge on the topic by adding other discussion points from previous knowledge and by exploring new possibilities that could relate to the topic, and finally an evaluation to see how well the students were able to grasp the new concepts. The other framework I enjoyed was Gardner's Multiple Intelligences. As a teacher I need to mix up the way group work and evaluations are done. By using Gardner's Multiple Intelligences, I can change how my lessons are by changing which intelligence to use. Mixing up how lessons are taught and mixing up how evaluations are taken allows students with strengths in different intelligences a stronger opportunity to succeed because they are never stuck doing the same task over and over. If I always had my assessments be logical and mathematical, students who don't do well with these assessments would never score as high as they could only due to the format. By mixing up the assessments I will be more able to assess the student's knowledge on the topic and their application of the knowledge instead of their ability to successfully complete the given assessment's format.