Re:Weaving History

You might have seen this special collector's edition of Canada's History - the Big Questions of Canada.  I know I've given them to lots of teachers, and I found the essays enlightening and engaging for myself. The question I'm addressing in this blog post is, how could you use this in your classroom? I think we need to back up a little and ask ourselves, as history teachers a fundamental question: How many history essays have your students actually read? I know I had never really asked my students to read a well-written history essay, I just asked them to write  a well-written history essay! I would venture to say that probably most teenagers are not seeking out history essays to read in their free time, so it's likely that the only place they would have encountered one is in history class. How could I expect my students to write a good history essay if they had never even read one?!! The light bulb went off for me a few years ago, when I learned abo...

So this post was prompted by the awesome #sschat on Monday, May 8th, 2017 on Ending the Year with a Bang! And it brought up this activity that I did with my world history class ( CHW3M - World to 1500 CE ) a few years ago. Lots of teachers asked me for pictures of the activity, but, for some crazy reason, I didn't take any! So, as promised, here's a description of the activity and some of the insights that my students had because of the activity. What I love about this activity is that it can be adapted to any topic in history, students use their numeracy skills and must apply the historical significance criteria and really think big-picture about continuity and change . (see my Numeracy and Historical Thinking pos t for more details about this) Materials Needed I started with a roll of newsprint end - one of the tech teachers was going to the Ottawa Citizen office to pick some up, and asked if I wanted any. I didn't yet know what I would use it for, but timelines see...

One of my favourite introduction activities for historical thinking is the Bio-Poem. A simple "fill-in-the-blanks" poetry exercise from The Big Six   that gets students thinking deeply about evidence and historical perspectives. I know that many history teachers start in historical thinking with Historical Significance , but I would argue, based on my experience with this lesson, that most teenagers will connect and engage more readily with Historical Perspective-Taking. I think this might be because adolescents live in the emotions and imagination, and this is often what we need to do in taking historical perspectives. The trick is to then get them to connect those emotions and imagination to the evidence. This lesson was designed to happen at the beginning of the course as part of a Portfolio Assessment and takes about 2 class periods, but certainly can be adapted for other times and uses. I really love the fabulous 20 minute NFB film - Minoru: A Memory of Exile . It s...

With much of the professional development focus on numeracy in Ontario this year, I've been contemplating the connections between numeracy and historical thinking. There are the obvious statistics and graphs that we all use to unpack historical content, such as this graph from    Canadian Sources Investigated: The enlistments (green) and the casualties (purple) for the months of 1917 is a great example of how we often think of "numeracy." Students need to interpret and understand the "content" and implications of it. This is great! While these types of activities are a necessary and excellent part of understanding the events of the past, alone, they are not yet really historical thinking.  What I've really been wondering is how do numeracy skills and concepts overlap or converge with the historical thinking concepts ? Earlier this year, one of my more numerate colleagues shared some of her realizations from a lesson study observation, whe...