Blog #8: 15 Minutes A Day
At my internship school, we are given just fifteen minutes a day for social studies time. If this seems like an incredibly short amount of time to you, trust me when I say that it flies by. I’ve been responsible for teaching during this time since the early weeks of my time in the classroom. Our fifteen minutes is scheduled from 7:45 to 8:00, the first fifteen minutes of the day. This means that while I’m teaching my lesson, a lot of other things are going on in the room too. Some students are still walking in with their breakfasts, others are eating their breakfasts, and my CT is making sure that all of the pencils are sharpened. It can be chaotic and noisy, and sometimes the time is completely swallowed up because we have to do some other activity with the kids. For example, a few weeks ago we spent all the social studies time for the week helping the kids fill out a paper to make new passwords for iReady, which they still have not even had to use. And there isn’t any time to fit in more social studies during the rest of the day, because of the strict schedule that we follow to ensure a full two hour literacy block and ERT and RTI time every day. Despite all of this, I still think that social studies is incredibly important and I try to make the most of the time that I do get to teach.
When my CT first handed over the responsibility of social studies to me I spent a lot of time on CPALMS looking at the standards for our grade and figuring out which ones I wanted to hit first and how I was going to do it. It was around the middle of September and Constitution Day is September 17th, so that’s where I began. I was well aware that my students were young and that trying to get them to even understand the Preamble to the Constitution was reaching for the stars. But I wanted to try and I believed that they could do it. My idea to play the Schoolhouse Rock song about the Preamble went over like a lead balloon, so I had to change my tactics. I figured out that many of my students are visual learners, so I printed out several pictures having to do with the Constitution and decided to have class discussions about them. I started by showing the kids a picture of the Constitution. It amazed them that paper could look so brown and old and they were stunned to know that writing could look so fancy and be written with a feather. They were further amazed when I brought out the pictures of the Founding Fathers so they could see what people used to look and dress like. The boys were particularly appalled by the idea of wearing a wig. I also did a read aloud with a book called We the Kids, which is the text of the Preamble to the Constitution with kid-friendly illustrations and interpretations of what lines like “ensure domestic tranquility” mean.
More recently we’ve been working on learning more about different symbols and places that are important to the United States. Many of my students have spent little or no time out of the state, so I’ve been using technology and pictures to open up the world for them. I started with a symbol that they could pick out, because they see it every day- the flag. It was an amazing feeling to see the lightbulbs go off in their brains when they made the connection between the fifty stars on the flag and the fifty states they see every day on the area rug that we have in our classroom. Next, I recruited my mom to spend time going through our old family photos to find ones from our trips to Washington D.C. and New York City. She came through with pictures from the Statue of Liberty, the White House, and several other D.C. landmarks. I put these pictures on my phone and then put my phone on the ELMO to show the kids. Needless to say they loved getting to see old pictures of Ms. Johnson and getting to see what my sister and parents look like.
A cell phone and an overhead projector are probably considered “low-tech” by the standards of today, but they are the resources I have to work with in my classroom. I’ve used them and I’ve seen real results. I truly feel that my students know more about social studies and our history than they did at the beginning of the year. I haven’t done any assessments yet, other than asking some questions to see if they remember what we talked about the day before, but I’m planning an art project so they can show off what they’ve learned about these symbols and cities.
I’ve also been able to use the social studies time that we have to make connections to what the students are doing in reading. Last week for reading the students completed a close-read of The Story of Ruby Bridges. She was one of the first black girls to go to a white elementary school in the 1960’s. My students were very interested in Ruby and her story, so I was disappointed the text they were given did not include any pictures. So we spent social studies time that week looking at pictures of Ruby Bridges, the angry crowd she had to walk through every day, and the US marshals who protected her. We also read an illustrated version of the story. For some of my students it wasn’t until they saw her picture that they realized she was a real person and that the events in the story actually happened. That was one of those teaching moments when I realized that I had truly done something right. So thank you Google Images!
Integrating social studies with reading is something that is promoted by Cunningham and Allington (2015) in their book Classrooms That Work. They discuss how putting the two subjects together helps to build up students’ vocabularies and shows them how reading has real-world meaning (Cunningham & Allington, 2015).
I love my noisy and chaotic first fifteen minutes of the day. They go by too fast and all too often don’t even happen; but when they do it’s truly a sight to see. Even my students who are below level readers and struggle with writing participate in our discussions. I’m excited to take a class about teaching social studies next semester. A quote from my favorite TV show is “We could all be better teachers.” I can’t wait to learn more about what I can be doing during those fifteen minutes to help and teach my students.
Addresses FEAPS 2 a, g, h, and i
References: Cunningham, P., & Allington, R. (2015). Classrooms That Work: They Can All Read and Write (6th ed.). New York, New York: Pearson.
