I LOVE walking into book stores. The feel, smell, and sight of new books and unknown stories makes me HAPPY! That feeling that I get when I walk into a Barnes and Nobles is the SAME feeling that I want my kiddos to feel when they walk into our classroom library. Here are some quick tips and thoughts to help you spice up your classroom library and make it a magical, calming, and happy place from my show on the ITeachTVNetwork. ...
Archives for December 2015
Make Social Studies Fun Part 1
Social Studies can be a hard subject to teach. Not many kiddos just LOVE learning about history, and our new TN standards are HARD...good but HARD! :) So, I have been adding as many simulations as possible to our learning curriculum. A huge shout out goes to the TPT seller The Sweetest Thing for her massive unit on Westward Expansion. This activity came from a part of her unit. If you teach 4th/5th grade SS then you want to own this bundle! The students had spent a lot of time before this unit discussing the WHY of Westward Expansion. Why did we move west? What were some causes for our expansion? And so on. After they had a good understanding of the "why", we moved on to the "how". There is an amazing History Channel documentary out there that discusses the Transcontinental Railroad beautifully. I highly recommend purchasing this DVD to go with it. It really helped my students with comprehending just how big of a deal this railroad was and how difficult it was to build ...