Today was the day that we actually started our social studies unit. We did some prior lessons to activate background knowledge of directions and various other activities, however, today was the day. I honestly was expecting students to not be that excited about learning about social studies. I just remember social studies as being a topic that the students my age did not enjoy back in the day (makes me feel old!), but boy was I wrong!
The moment I said we were starting a social studies unit on Native Americans and that they were going to do the teaching, they were smiling and were so so excited! Those moments are the ones that reassure that I am where I need to be. I felt such a strong feeling of encouragement from these students that I was just so excited myself.
The one thing that I learned today is that giving directions takes a lot longer than I had planned! Given that today was the first day of giving the project, I understood that it was going to take longer, but we spent so much time going over directions!!
While I was a little shocked at how long it took to get through the directions, I was happy to do this because it was necessary. The students had great questions and I wanted to get all questions out of the way for right now so when they started researching, they could focus on the task at hand.
Once the questions started to repeat themselves or when the students were taking us further down into deeper steps that we were not focusing on, I made sure to cut off the questions to begin researching. When I was planning this unit, I wanted the students to take a few steps towards project based learning, therefore, they are finding out the information themselves by resources I give them.
One thing that I made sure we had in place were checkpoints. I emphasized the importance of these checkpoints so we can make sure that we are progressing at an expected rate to be able to accomplish our goals. I could tell that the students relaxed a little bit when I told them this, because I felt like they thought I may have been turning them loose into the wild. However, I want to make sure I am a facilitator in this project, being available during every step of the way :)
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