One difficulty I have faced teaching social studies is figuring out how to help my students connect with events from the past. I want my students to be able to go beyond just reading about historical events. I want them to be able to reflect and think about what it would have been like to have gone through an event, or what it would have been like to have been alive during a given time period. This year I decided to have my students work on a yearlong project, and just because it’s “yearlong” doesn’t mean it’s super time consuming. This project has helped my students stop and think. There is something about realizing some historical event happened, on this very day, that helped my students connect with past events. Not only that, but this project also has helped my students with their research skills, standards we are learning about in class, and perseverance (because it isn’t always easy to find an important event that happened on a specific day in a specific region).
Basically this project entails 4 students every day having an assignment due. Wait! It’s not that bad! I promise! At the very beginning of the year, I sat down with all of my class rosters (I teach 5 classes). I focused on the following regions because these are the regions we study in the 6th grade: Latin America & the Caribbean, Europe, Canada, and Australia. {I put up “Other” because I knew I would have some students who would make a mistake and not find an event in their assigned region. I wanted to still be able to hang theirs up even if it was not completed correctly. You could also use “Other” if you used tickets or some other incentive in your classroom. A student could earn that incentive by going above and beyond what you ask of them by finding an event in another part of the world in addition to the region he/she was assigned.}
I could have also added in more regions, but this was the first year I tried this project, so I wanted to start out slowly (and I only have so much bulletin board space). Then I tallied up all the days that would be in the school year. I included weekends and days we weren’t in school from mid-August (because I needed time to explain this project to my students and give them time to start researching) all the way to the next to last week of school. I don’t have the exact number because I left it at school (Friday was early release for snow…I was a tad excited to get home!), but I took that total number of days and divided it by the number of students. That’s the number of days each student would be responsible for finding events. Each of my students would be assigned about 10 dates each. I wanted each student to find an event for each region, and I wanted to make sure students had a couple weeks in between their assigned dates.
I only assigned dates for first semester, so I could tweak the process if needed for second semester. I made an Excel spreadsheet for each of my classes, with the kiddos down the left and the regions across the top. To assign the dates, I started with the first kid in my first class, and began writing down the dates under the Europe column. When I reached the end of the first class, I went on to the second class. And so forth until I had used all of the dates for first semester. Then I moved onto assigning the dates in first semester for Canada. I used the same process for each region. Here are two of my lists so you can get the idea:
Loved the info you have here and this comes from a ‘long-time‘ history teacher.
This is such a great idea! I definitely want to try it with my students this year. Do you have any suggestions on how to get students started searching for events? Such as do your students generally just Google “historical event in Canada on such and such date?” We find that our students lack research skills so I would definitely have to give them guidance in the beginning. But I think this is such a wonderful idea I can’t wait to implement it!
Hi, Michelle! I spend one class period with my students researching their first date. We are fortunate enough to have enough technology for each student to have one, but students could also use their own tablets or phones. I spend the first 10 minutes showing them on the smart board how I would search for an event for a specific date in a region, and then they research for theirs. I am there to help them out, which I end up having to do. Some students are able to do it quickly, so they also become helpers for kiddos having a hard time. Sometimes it is difficult to find an event for a specific date in a given country. I tell students in those cases, they can give me the birthday or death date of a famous person from that country, and they have to explain that person’s significance. Or they can also give me a sports event if they have a hard time finding something. This only happens a few times, though. I also have morning times before school when students can come in and research, so I am there to help if needed.
I do suggest to them to google “historical event in Canada on July 3” (for example), and often that helps them find something. If a student has some background knowledge, he/she might know that they could search something like “WW2 event in Europe on May 6,” so they could be a little more specific on their search.
It takes a bit of time in the beginning, but I thought it was SO worth it! Let me know if you have any more questions! 🙂
I teach 8th grade US History (Exploration/Colonization through Reconstruction 1877) in Texas. I want to do this, but I am stumped on what categories to use. Some ideas I’ve come up with are regions of the US such as Southwest, North, South, West Coast, etc., break it into years (eras), or categories such as Conflicts, Inventions, Heroes, etc. Any ideas?
Hi! I definitely think you are on the right track! The way I decided was what I wanted students to learn or explore according to our standards. We focus on regions, so the years weren’t important, and I let students use any year they found an important event. Since yours is bound by years, I would break it into the regions and give the year span students can pull events from. You can give students ideas of events using conflicts, inventions, etc. I think by using regions as the main categories, it will help students better understand where events took place as well as how these events influences other regions. I hope that helps and made sense 🙂
I’m a little confused with the assigning of dates. Do you just go vertically down the list? Do you start over with each class? Do you focus on one region first then go to another?
Hi, Marcus!
I do go down vertically, and I do start over for each class. That way each class is covering all the dates. I assigned one date PER region each day so that students didn’t bring in the same event.