Create Social Studies Projects that Engage Your Grades 4 to 6 Students!

 

At the end of a social studies units, teachers often find themselves struggling to design a "culminating task" that is engaging for students and provides teachers with an opportunity to assess overall curriculum expectations.

What makes a great culminating project or task?

A culminating task or project should:

• address the overall curriculum expectations for the unit.
• cause students to think deeply about the important issues or questions brought up during the unit.
• be engaging and hold the interest of students over time.
• be shared with students in advance, using physical models 
• have clear timelines and success criteria.

Before even beginning a unit I already know what the final tasks or projects will be, and using the "backward design" model I plan the entire unit, making sure that every lesson will contribute in some way towards that task.  

I show students what that task will look like early in the unit, and have them work on it bit by bit from lesson to lesson.  I precreate physical models of the different project options, so that students can choose the option that works best for them.  

Types of Projects

Some of my favourite culminating projects or tasks are:

1.  Brochures

2.  Project Cubes

3.  Posters

4.  Debates

5.  Report Cards

6.  Event

The image to the right show a "project cube" that I created for my Grade 4/5 class.  We were exploring Strand B of the Ontario Social Studies Curriculum, which focused on:

Grade 4:  Physical and Political Regions of Canada               

Grade 5:  The Role of Government and Responsible Citizenship

As a final task I wanted the Grade 4s to show how industry and the environment affect each other, and to describe how actions taken by citizens and industries can protect the environment while still meeting human needs.

The Grade 5s would describe and assess any government action has been taken to address an environmental issue, to show different perspectives on that issue, and to describe how Indigenous Peoples have been affected by the issue.

Students could choose to show their learning through a:

* project cube

* poster

* brochure

* scrapbook

* report

I gave physical models of each option, using the issue of invasive species in the Great Lakes.  I also shared clear criteria for each type of project.  (***For your own copy of these project criteria, click here OR on the image to the left!***)

If you are an Ontario Grade 4/5 teach who would like to check out the full unit, click here.

  

Scrapbook Page

              Report Card on Government Action (Grade 5)

Note:  A Grade 5 teacher recently contacted me to let me know that after creating a report card about how governments addressed food insecurity, her class took the "action plan" to another level by creating a huge fundraiser for a local food bank.  Students had been exploring inequities in food availability, and worked through the steps in my Grade 5 government unit to take action themselves!  Amazing!!

Reminder:  Click here or on the clipboard below to download your FREE editable social studies project criteria!

What are YOUR favourite types of culminating tasks or projects?  Let me know below!

Margie

Teaching Canadian Government in Elementary School

 

Looking for some new ideas to teach Canadian government in your Grade 4-6 social studies class?  Believe it or not, it can be engaging for both you and your students!  

Check out these 3 ideas for bringing Canadian government alive in your classroom!

Newspaper Article Sort 

Find newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, and any other current print resources that have information relevant to any level of government.  (If it's an election year, you will have more than enough material delivered by the candidates and their campaign teams right to your door!)  Check with your local newspaper, and see if they would be willing to donate (or sell at a steep discount) copies of their papers for your government unit.

After spending some time teaching about the 3 levels of government and their responsibilities, explain that all forms of media spend much of their time investigating and reporting upon issues that are important to all Canadians, all people in a province or territory, and/or citizens of a municipality.  Create a chart with three columns:  Federal/Provincial (or Territorial)/Municipal.

Distribute the print resources you have to students, and ask them to cut out and sort any articles in which a level of government might be involved. Once completed, take one level and discuss the various issues students found that might be handled by that government. Repeat with the other two levels of government. If you wanted to take the learning further, you could proceed with the next strategy, which is.....Community Mapping.

Community Mapping

The Ontario Social Studies Curriculum for Grade 5, Strand B states that students "will develop plans of action to address significant social and environmental issues".  The easiest way to approach this is by having your students IDENTIFY social and environmental issues within their immediate community, whether that be the school catchment area, the small town they live in, or the rural area that surrounds the school.

Here is a short summary of what I have done in my own class:

1. Community Features: Class makes a chart of buildings, features and services that people might expect when moving to a new community.
2. Community Walk:Class takes a walk through the community, looking for the buildings services, and features from their chart, as well as identifying issues in the community.
3. Community Mapping:  Students return to class.  Each student or pair of students creates a "bird-eye" view map of the community.  
4. Community Issues:  Students discuss and chart the community features they noticed, using their maps as a reference tool.  They then create a 2nd "Issues" chart, noting where the community could benefit from some improvements.
5. Choosing Community Action Focus:  Have students form groups.  Each group chooses ONE "issue" from the community for which they will create an action plan to address. For example, in the "Issues" chart below, one group might decide to take on the lack of a municipal pool, and create their plan to approach the municipal country to address the lack of a splash pad or pool.
6. Community Action Plan:  Students make a plan for doing further research, contacting local officials, planning a publicity session.....the options are endless!

Chat Stations

If you're looking for a quick introduction to Canadian government, try introducing some "chat stations" into your classroom.  Collect anywhere between 6 and 12 government-related issues or images, and post each in different spot in your classroom, along with a prompt or question for students to consider as they rotate in small groups from station to station.  (You may want each group to record their thoughts on a clipboard as they rotate through the stations.)  After everyone has had a chance to visit each station, bring them back together to discuss each station.  

I hope at least one of these ideas inspires you to try something new with your class this year!  If you're looking for more ideas and activities to support you in teaching Canadian government, consider these resources from my Coach's Corner TPT store:

Making Connections in the Ontario Grade 4/5 Split Grade Social Studies Class

It's that time of year again when split-grade teachers face the challenge of organizing their social studies programs in a way that doesn't overwhelm either themselves or their students.  I've written about how Grade 5/6 social studies can be approached, and today I'm hoping to help Grade 4/5 teachers look at Strand A
of the Ontario Social Studies with a positive outlook!  
A quick reminder:  the two units are:

• Grade 4:  Early Societies, 3000 BCE - 1500 CE
• Grade 5:  First Nations and Europeans in New France and Early Canada

Looking at the Big Ideas in Strand A

The Heritage and Identity strand of the Ontario Social Studies Curriculum asks students to explore a variety of communities, focusing upon:

a)  connections between the past and the present
b)  interactions within and between different communities

Looking at the "big ideas" of the curriculum can help teachers focus on the most important concepts we want students to think about, even long after the actual unit is finished.  I've spent some time thinking about the big ideas for Strand A, and organized them in this chart:

Looking at the big ideas this way makes planning just a bit easier!  Basically, I want students to:

a)  understand that we learn from historical ideas and viewpoints that help us make better sense of things occurring in the world around them
b)  early societies were created through the conflict and cooperation between groups of people, and between people and their environments

I am not worried that my students will remember the exact date that Samuel de Champlain arrived in North America for the first time.  Instead, I want them to explore and think about WHY Champlain wanted to create a settlement there HOW he and other Europeans treated the First Nations groups already living there, and WHAT conflicts and instances of cooperation occurred as early Canada developed.  While that particular group is more the focus for Grade 5s, the Grade 4s can also explore the same concepts with the Early Aztecs in Mexico, or with the feudal society in Medieval England.

These big ideas also invite students to contemplate and explore the overarching question in a Grade 4/5 class:  How Do Societies Survive and Grow?

Looking carefully at the "Big Ideas" and "Concepts of Social Studies Thinking" at the front of the Ontario Social Studies Curriculum always helps me clarify what my students should really be thinking about, and saves me from panicking at dealing with two sets of expectations at the same time.

By looking at the curriculum in this way, I can create a unit that let me teach one lesson to both grades, without having to run back and forth between the two groups. After a frontloading lesson about how environmental features affect where societies or cultures establish themselves, the Grade 4s can look at the way the Aztecs of Mexico and the Inuit of Canada were influenced by the land around them, while the Grade 5s can do the same with various Indigenous groups and early European settlers.  

In fact, I create two units for my Coach's Corner TPT store, one in PDF format while the other one contains the same lessons and tasks only in digital form using Google Slides.  You can check them out by clicking the links below!

How do YOU approach dealing with social studies in your split-grade classroom?  I'd love to hear from you!

Margie

Teaching Historical Significance Criteria in the Upper Elementary Classroom

In conversation with a friend last week, she mentioned that she was frustrated teaching Grade 7 history because there seemed to be so many "events" to cover, and so little time.  How could her students learn so many dates, names, and events?  She didn't have endless time to devote to helping her students learn about each item in the list of curriculum expectations.  Hmmm - my mind went immediately to the "Concepts of Disciplinary Thinking" highlighted in the 2018 Ontario Social Studies Curriculum, in particular to "Historical Significance".

I asked her whether she wanted her students to memorize a list of events, or to be able to determine the significance of a particular event.  Which is the bigger academic skill, that a student can carry forward into other grades?  That's an easy question for me:  I want them to be able to look at an event and think about the importance or significance of that event by itself, or in comparison to another event. For example, which was more significant:  the War of 1812, or the Rebellions of 1837-1838?  Students can use criteria to help them with this evaluation.

Historical Significance Criteria

Relevance:  Ask your students to think about who needs to know about a particular person, place, or event.  Is it relevant to just a few people or isolated community, or to a whole country or beyond?  An event that only a particular province or state needs to consider may be more significant than one that needs to be known by an entire country.  

Impact:  Can your students also think about how long an person, place, or event affected history?  A community event that affected people only for a year could be considered to be more significant that an event whose effect could still be felt 30 years later.

Consequences:  Can your students think about the seriousness of an event?  An event that caused a loss of local jobs (such as a factory closure) is likely less significant than one that caused serious physical harm to that same community (such as the water contamination of the public water system).  

This is what I want for my students - the ability to think like a historian and consider things like perspective, significance, cause & consequence...and all those other great things that help them become critical thinkers!

If you're interested in downloading a FREE version of the Historical Significance chart shown above, please click here:  Freebie Historical Significance Poster

Margie

A Look at Split Grade 5/6 Social Studies Strand B: People & Environments

I've been hearing from many teachers lately concerned about how to keep their sanity while trying to handle the 2018 Ontario Social Studies Curriculum in a split grade, and as I have rarely taught a straight grade, I thought I'd share a few thoughts on the topic.

                    Grade 5/6:  People and Environments

The Grade 5/6 split is one that can be particularly troubling for teachers, as at first glance the units can seem so unrelated, but I think if we take a closer look, the expectations are actually quite similar.  Today I'm going to explore the People and Environments strand:

• Grade 5:  The Role of Government and Responsible Citizenship
• Grade 6:  Canada's Interactions with the Global Economy

Basically the Grade 5 unit has students look at current social & environment issues within the country from various perspectives, examining and evaluating the actions taken by various levels of government to address these issues, and explore their own responsibilities as citizens as they create action plans to address these issues.

The Grade 6 unit has students explore current social, political, economic, and environmental issues withing the global community, examining and evaluating the actions taken by Canadian federal, provincial/territorial & local governments as well as NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) to address these issues and explore Canada's participation in different international accords, organizations, and programs.

Can you see the commonalities here? 

• The Grade 5's are basically looking at social & environmental issues within our country, seeing how various levels of government handle these issues, and then go on to explore how they themselves can influence how decisions are made through their own activism.
• The Grade 6's are also looking at social & environmental issues (and adding on political & economic issues), but this time within the entire world, and seeing how Canadian governments, governments from other countries, and NGOs handle these issues.  Instead of creating their own action plans, they go on to explore Canada's international presence within various organizations.

In a Grade 5/6 split I see the potential here to perhaps keep the focus on social and environmental issues, such as child poverty or the protection & availability of clean water within Canada as well as within the world.

Coach's Corner Split Grade Strand B Blended Unit:

Using the ideas from above, I created a split grade "blended" unit to use with my Grade 5/6 class.  I call it a blended unit because I have blended the "big ideas" from both grades to create lessons that can be taught to both grades at once.  Each grade may have different texts or slightly different tasks to explore the lesson's themes, before participating in knowledge building circles to share the connections between their learning.  Check it out here: