Archive for February, 2013
Shout out: Morning Meeting
At the beginning of the semester, the class learned about Morning Meeting. In Morning Meeting, the class greets each other, shares, participates in a game or activity, and reads news and announcements. The purpose is to have fun, build community and develop social and academic skills. This shout out is to all the teacher candidates […]
Minnesota Council for the Social Studies Conference!
The Minnesota Council for the Social Studies is the state-level chapter of the National Council for the Social Studies organization. Both organizations provide opportunities for K-12 teachers to explore innovative curriculum, develop social studies content knowledge, and make connections with other social studies educators. On Monday, March 11, our class will be attending the MCSS […]
Teaching with the Giant Map of Africa
This semester’s elementary Social Studies methods group jumped right into teaching! For our first day of class, we helped second grade students from St. Peter’s South Elementary explore National Geographic’s Giant Map of Africa. In this activity, we asked students to estimate whether Africa is longer north-south or east-west. Then the second grade students used […]
West Wing wisdom: Maps and scale
This is a slight revision to a blog post from last semester. I think it is relevant, given our discussion about scale in class today. Enjoy!: Here’s a 4 minute clip from a West Wing episode called “Why are we changing maps?”. In it, the characters make an argument that maps are political and that […]