Social
StudiesSocial
Studies
Remember to bookmark and/or print articles and links that you enjoy in this class.
History | Geography | Civics | Economics | Decision Making
1. Use holidays as a topic
for creating a Kid Pix or Kidspiration timeline of family celebrations.
For example, students interview a parent and a grandparent at Halloween, then
draw a picture of themselves dressed for Halloween, what a parent dressed as,
and what a grandparent dressed as. Will lead to good classroom discussions (What's
a hobo??)
2. Yahooligans is one of
many sites that run current events headlines. Smart practice: check the site
out ahead of time. There may be articles that you feel uncomfortable with or
that are not appropriate for your grade level.
4. Look up and be ready to discuss a historical event that occurred today. You can use a Daily Factoid (download to your school/class Website from http://www.surfnetkids.com/daily.html).
5. Create seasonal pictures with Kid Pix for calendar illustrations. There are many ways to do this...
6. Blue Mountain Cards offers daily celebrations.
Look ahead to the next week - you'll always find something to celebrate - for
example, May 8 is No Socks Day (and more importantly, May 6 is No Diet Day!!).
7. All About Me books can now become slideshows. Scan photos, add digital pictures and drawings, and record students voices telling all about themselves. Even a simple page created by each student makes a wonderful slideshow to display during Open House or Parent Teacher Conferences.
8. In Kid Pix, draw a pumpkin, evergreen tree, heart, etc. Save. Kids can decorate with moopies or Stampinator (KPS) or stickers and animated stickers (KP3) put their name on, and save. Assemble as a seasonal slide show.
9. At the end of each month, ask the class help put together a diary page recording speakers, field trips, birthdays, activities, units, etc. that occurred during the past month. By the end of the school year, you'll have a wonderful timeline SlideShow!
10.Map students’ bodies, their bedrooms, and your classroom, expand mapping to the neighborhood. Photocopy a city map (yes, copiers are an incredible technology!) and have students highlight your school and their home, then trace the route they take to get home. Highlight various community places of interest such as the fire department, other schools, parks, etc.
11.What else does a community
need? Expand this activity to creating their own communities using software
such as Tom Snyder’s Neighborhood MapMachine.
12.Have a group create a Lego or milk carton community, and use a camera to record their works of art for posterity (and their portfolio).
13.Make a Town – Free software (pc only) that allows kids to create their own town
14.Flat Stanley - Exchange Flat Stanley and his journal between schools.
15.Postcard Geography - Your class commits
to exchanging picture postcards (purchased, computer or handmade) with all other
participants. Join 1st or 2nd semester.
16.Spice up your projects
with your digital camera. Students at every grade level can illustrate
a project with digital photos in KidPix. Projects can range from simple photos
taken during a class walk around the community showing various community workers,
to a virtual tour of your school, complete with audio remarks, to an illustrated
history of your community.
17.Travel Buddies
are a good way to reach out beyond your classroom, map your stuffed animal’s
journeys, and collect information about other students while examining your
own locale. Read Traveling Mascot Project
and then check out the Traveling Buddies Chatboard
to see what’s available.
18. Ben's Guide to US Government - Divided into grade levels: K-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12
19. Use Kidspiration to record students’ brainstorming of classroom rules. Then ‘move’ the ideas around to sort, classify, and eliminate repeats until you come up with a simple set of rules that are easily observed.
20. Create a Kid Pix slideshow of classroom rules. Illustrate by taking digital pix of kids posing – observing rules and breaking rules.
21. Dream Careers – An excellent article about a 1st grade project. Check it out.
22. As a culmination of a career unit – have kids dress up as a community worker. Take their picture and insert into a Kid Pix slide. They can add (or dictate to you) the name of the worker, some of their tools, and how they help kids. Put all slides together into a slideshow, or print out and make a class book.
23.Create your own coin
stamps to use in Kid Pix. Take digital pictures of individual coins – front
& back. Crop to get rid of the excess background. Select a stamp that you
never use. Edit it by replacing with your coin picture.
24.Create a template with stamps of toys or foods and prices for each. Students can use coin stamps to show how much they would have to pay for each item.
25.Global Grocery List - Students share local grocery prices to build a growing table of data.
26.Money Flashcards – Coins & bills
27.Have each child create a page indicating their hopes and goals for the coming year. Assemble pages on alternate "trucks" in the SlideShow mode (blanks will not appear when playing the SlideShow). At year's end, students should view the SlideShow and create a second page for the blank trucks indicating their accomplishments - sort of "before" and "after" pages for each child. This would be a wonderful "time capsule" to play again at their graduation from elementary school!
28.Create a SlideShow to reinforce Social Skill concepts. Pick a social skill (ie. controlling anger). SlideShow depicts the steps to take when you get angry. Assign students to review these steps as needed.
29.To help students develop
a vocabulary of feelings, assign a SlideShow where each slide depicts
a feeling, and an example of when they experienced it. "I get angry when…,”
“I get embarrassed when…”
