Getting Started- 3rd & 5th grade Social Studies Lessons

Bob O'Neill

Social Studies is pretty much my favorite subject to learn about & teach (with the exception of music). I'm going to be teaching 10 Social Studies lessons this semester, five in 5th grade & 5 in 3rd grade. My supervising practitioner is a third grade teacher whose teaching style & approach I admire. Right now her class is half way through learning about 'Native Americans', soon she will be transitioning to immigration, which is an area that seems to be studied by all third grade classes. I went to elementary school in the town neighboring the town I'm doing my student teaching in. I was in third grade in 1994-95, we studied immigration & Ellis Island right around this time of the year; it is pretty cool IMO that schools are still pretty much going about introducing this topic in the same way they were 20 years ago. After a week or so of studying this topic in class, the students have an 'Immigration Day' in which the whole third grade dresses up as an 'Immigrant', they pick a country of origin, & have to make sure to know what to say in order to be permitted on the 'ship'..to give the students a somewhat realistic experience by rejecting students who say the 'wrong thing' when applying to get on the boat to Ellis Island. I learned this first hand when I exclaimed that I was going to America to 'find work'..I was rejected and not allowed to get on 'the boat'. That can be pretty upsetting when you're 8 years old, I was able to sneak my way on, get in line, pretend I lost my slip that was stamped 'rejected' or something like that, & make it on the 'ship'. It was a somewhat dishonest thing to do, but at the time, I really wanted to 'make it on'.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to working with the students during these units, I haven't started planning my lessons as far as immigration, I've just begun working on lessons for the Native American unit. I'm not yet aware of what subject I will be teaching in the 5th grade class, but I know whatever it is I will thoroughly enjoy it. I enjoy working with 5th grade more so than any other grade. 5th graders are the most fun to work with IMO because of the content they are studying, it is much more advanced than 3-4th grade, & IMO a lot more fun. Another reason I enjoy working with this grade is because they are advanced/old enough to learn 'cool things' (the ocean, revolutionary war, European explorers..etc) but they are young enough to still have fun, they haven't quite developed that ego/attitude many of them will develop in middle school.

For teaching Native American tribes, depending on what tribe I start off teaching (my SP hasn't decide which tribe she is going to have me teach, but I should be teaching my first lesson at the end of this week!) I'm in the process of outlining how I will approach the lesson, then I'm going to fill in the details. I'm going to introduce the tribe, by instigating a conversation that covers the details of other tribes that they have already done. I will lead the conversation in a direction that will end up in a place that helps the students make the connection between similarities between the tribe(s) that have been studied, & the tribe I'm introducing. I will then introduce the tribe we are going to be studying during that lesson, & explain what we will be learning about them, & how that will help us understand the similarities & differences of the different cultures of the people who lived in the U.S. before many of our ancestors arrived. For the first lesson, I will likely show a youtube video that covers the tribe we are learning about, the following activity may entail having them write a paragraph in which they 'react' to the information they learned from the video; afterward, I was thinking of having them break into groups of 3-4, collaborating & sharing what they wrote with each other, then I will ask each group to create a poster that conveys the key points/opinions/insights about the culture of the tribe, & finally, have each group share their poster/info w/ the class