Re:Weaving History

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 There are the obvious statistics and graphs that we all use to unpack historical content, such as this graph from    Canadian Sources Investigated: The enlistments (green) and the casualties (purple) for the months of 1917 is a great example of how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...

As we get closer to the holidays, I've been thinking about what gifts I can give to my colleagues. It has become apparent to me in 2016 that the world needs more thoughtful dialogue around important issues, and the social science classroom has a special place in this dialogue. In writing resources and attending conferences, I have gathered over the years, a rich collection of teacher-friendly resources that I can recommend. I'm often surprised when I hear that my colleagues have not heard of one of my go-to resources, so in the interest of sharing and enriching our classrooms, here are my recommendations and thoughts on some of the latest, greatest teaching resources for history and citizenship education.  This is not an exhaustive list, but I hope it can get you started on your journey, or give you a new idea or place to explore. Please share in the comments if you have more to share History and Primary Source Resources The Historical Thinking Project - The home o...

"Your resume is something you write as you go, not at the end. Live out loud! W e need to celebrate our learning publicly!" "Perfect is the enemy of done. Start. Help each other! If you wanna learn, you have to learn right beside them!" - Kevin Honeycutt On May 17, 2016, I was fortunate to attend the OCDSB Digital Learning Symposium. The keynote speaker was Kevin Honeycutt . If you don't follow him on Twitter, start now! In a quick review of the twitter feed from the day (#DLAchat), I pulled the best bits of advice, thoughts and inspiration that got most of us really excited - they are sprinkled throughout in purple. All really great words to inspire and live by, but the ones that got me going were Live out Loud! If we really care about education, and the future for our students, we need to be public about the amazing things we are doing and share them with the world. I had been toying with the idea of starting a blog for a few years, but put it o...