[00:00:00] Kirsten: This is the Social Studies Teacher Podcast, a show for busy elementary teachers looking for fun and engaging ways to easily add social studies into their classroom schedule without feeling overwhelmed or pressed for time. I'm Kirsten of the Southern Teach, an educator and mom who is passionate about all things social studies.[00:00:30]

[00:00:30] Kirsten: I love sharing ideas and strategies that are low prep and easy to implement, so let's dive in together.

[00:00:48] Kirsten: Hi there, and welcome to another episode of the Social Studies Teacher Podcast today. I'm so excited because I'm going to talk about social studies, activities that are fun, [00:01:00] engaging, and something that students will truly, truly enjoy when it comes to social studies, activities, and lessons. Upper elementary students, whether they're in third grade or fifth grade.

[00:01:12] Kirsten: Love something where they can get up and moving and talking. So for me as a social studies teacher, I was trying to always look for ways to incorporate some fun and movement while also learning important content that they needed to know for social studies topics. [00:01:30] So the four activities I have for you are going to make students really want to learn more about what they're learning in the specific part of social studies time, and it's also fun and educational.

[00:01:42] Kirsten: They're also easy to implement for you, so you don't have to spend a ton of time trying to prep in advance. But before we get started, I just wanted to make sure you know that. You can subscribe and you can like, and you could also share this with a social studies [00:02:00] teacher, friend, or upper elementary teacher friend.

[00:02:03] Kirsten: And if you are wanting to listen to this via your earbuds or would rather listen on the go or driving in your car, you can also listen to the social studies teacher podcast wherever you love to listen to podcasts. Or if you're more of a reader, you can always check out my blog, the southern teach.com/blog and linked in the description, you'll always find a relevant blog post related to the [00:02:30] topic I'm talking about for the day's episode.

[00:02:31] Kirsten: Believe it or not, this particular blog post that I'm sharing with you today, it's kind of like a remix because I'm not talking about. All seven activities, but if you wanna know the seven activities, you could always click on the blog post that is in the description. But this is one of the top blog posts that people find on Google search.

[00:02:52] Kirsten: So I wanted to make it YouTube official, but I also wanted to recap the top four of my favorite [00:03:00] activities from this list that I mentioned. And actually the last one I mentioned. Was it in the original blog post? So that's something new you'll get to hear about. And as always, I will be sharing with you any relevant resources that might be really helpful for you that are related to what I talk about in this episode.

[00:03:20] Kirsten: And you can always check the links in the description as well. Activity type number one is some type of daily review at the beginning or end of each class. [00:03:30] Take some time to review key concepts from the specific topic that you might have taught in a previous day, or what you taught on the days lesson.

[00:03:42] Kirsten: This can be done with some type of quiz, daily passages, some type of review game, however you wanna do it. Being able to take the time to review something every day, whether it is something that takes three minutes or 10 minutes, [00:04:00] is so helpful to help students retain the important concepts that they might have learned.

[00:04:06] Kirsten: It reinforces the material and it keeps students engaged and interested in the topic. Plus it is usually pretty easy to prep if you have some type of quick review game or quick quiz with a few questions or some type of exit ticket with maybe one or two short answer questions. The daily passages can also be something super quick if you use [00:04:30] chat GPT even, and you just generate a.

[00:04:34] Kirsten: Topic, you put in the grade level how many sentences you want it to be, and then it'll usually do a pretty good job of generating a paragraph and you can ask guided questions or have it generate questions on your behalf. I've got daily passages already done for you on a variety of topics. I've talked about this in many episodes past, but in case you haven't heard of it, [00:05:00] it's basically a short paragraph about a specific topic, and there's four days of that paragraph and three multiple choice questions for each page.

[00:05:11] Kirsten: So there's usually, for one topic, let's say three branches of government, there's gonna be four days. Day one is the executive branch, day two, legislative branch, day three, judicial branch, and day four checks and balances. And there are multiple choice questions [00:05:30] that go with each of those. Passages. And then if you want to do this, you can do a quiz.

[00:05:36] Kirsten: It's a seven question, multiple choice quiz that covers everything in the previous days. It's perfect to assign for day one, Monday day two, Tuesday, day three. Wednesday day four, Thursday day five or quiz would be on Friday. So super easy. There's a glossary answer key for each topic, and I've got a lot of positive comments on these daily passages.[00:06:00]

[00:06:00] Kirsten: So it is. Just tons of topics that you can choose from. You can pick and pull. You can purchase by domain, so you can purchase all the government topics and all of the economics topics, or you can bundle it, just buy all of it. Or if you are in Texas, you can purchase by grade level. So there's third grade communities, fourth grade Texas history, and fifth grade US history.

[00:06:23] Kirsten: And sixth grade is coming soon. I've got world cultures on deck, but right now with my guided [00:06:30] curriculum for sixth grade, I'm working on something a little bit different. It's a slide instead of passages and students are answering different prompts based off of. Things like critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making, and I am hoping to incorporate the social studies spiral review for fifth, fourth, and third grade.

[00:06:49] Kirsten: So stay tuned for that. A second one I wanted to mention are guided notes. So this is one that I am a big proponent of. I use. Guided notes with my students when I taught fifth grade social [00:07:00] studies and third grade social studies. It's a really great way to help students stay engaged and focused during some type of focused mini lesson where you're direct teaching a concept.

[00:07:11] Kirsten: What you can do is give students partially completed notes. So let's say you've got the information on a piece of paper you can just take out delete. And white out different words or phrases or whole sentences, depending on how much experience your [00:07:30] student has with guided notes and print it out, make copies, and give that to students.

[00:07:36] Kirsten: You can have students put it in folders, binders, interactive notebooks, and then you have a similar presentation with all the key notes and important information that they would go in and fill it. So that's kind of like skeleton notes. Or scaffolded notes is another word you would call it, or fill in the blank notes.

[00:07:56] Kirsten: Or you can do something very from scratch where [00:08:00] they have blank notes and they are filling in the information on the slides. I would recommend that for the more advanced students or older students, even in the secondary level, because if you're in third grade, they may or may not even. Understand what notes to take.

[00:08:15] Kirsten: And usually more times than not, they end up trying to copy all the slides word for word, and that is not what we want to do. So having some type of guided notes, your skeleton notes, where students can fill in the blank, different words and phrases, can really [00:08:30] encourage students to write down the most important information.

[00:08:33] Kirsten: And it helps with retention and it just encourages organization and helps grow their note taking skills in general. Plus, this is an easy prep activity that you can incorporate for a variety of topics throughout the year. My guided curriculum has guided notes incorporated into the specific program, but I also have.

[00:08:56] Kirsten: I guess what you would call anchor notes or anchor chart notes 'cause [00:09:00] they're pretty versatile. And for each topic there's usually one or two different versions, maybe three or four depending on the topic. There's one with just Texas topics. There's one with non Texas topics that could be for really any state.

[00:09:12] Kirsten: And there's a bundle that contains both. So I will make sure to link both so you can decide which one works best for you. All right, this one is my favorite. I shouldn't say favorite 'cause really all of them are my favorites. But I love project based learning activities. And of course the [00:09:30] upfront part of it, like planning it, making sure you have a good scope for it can be a little bit of upfront work, but they are doing most of the researching.

[00:09:39] Kirsten: They are finding the information, they're creating the product, and. You just give them the time to do it. It could take up multiple days, multiple weeks, depending on how intense you wanna get with it. But I think that project-based learning is something to obviously not do all the time, but I would [00:10:00] recommend doing it at least once a semester.

[00:10:03] Kirsten: And if you feel a little more confident, you can go in once a quarter and just have one. For the fall, winter time, before winter break, springtime, and then towards the end of the year, essentially you give them some type of prompt that they are going off of. They might be some type of essential question, something.

[00:10:25] Kirsten: Thought provoking based on what they've learned in social studies, and you give [00:10:30] students the tools and sources to research that information and create a product of their choice, whether it's some type of brochure or slideshow presentation or something. 3D and the product is something that is based off of their interest in what they enjoy.

[00:10:46] Kirsten: Maybe they wanna do some type of vlog of their own or movie trailers. I've had students do book trailers, which I guess is kind of related to this, but they got to pick a book that we read [00:11:00] together and they created using iMovie on iPads. And this was back when we only had like two iPads for each class.

[00:11:08] Kirsten: We didn't have all of our own devices at this time. It was a little bit before that time period that we all know, but either way, it was something that they got to take turns doing and practicing and they had storyboards and they. Practice their lines. If they decided to do a script and they got to record around the room and the school [00:11:30] and it was a whole thing.

[00:11:31] Kirsten: It was so much fun. And I could see this being really fun for social studies. You could have a certain topic that you guys talked about and they present some type of trailer or social studies trailer or movie trailer based on that topic that you've talked about. So let's say some type of historical event or some type of geography, like regions of the US.

[00:11:53] Kirsten: Maybe your group might have a North three East region and they're coming up with some trailer trying to convince people [00:12:00] to visit the Northeast region, so the sky is the limit with how you can incorporate projects. Those are just some ideas, and I do have some resources. And episodes related to project-based learning in general.

[00:12:14] Kirsten: So I will make sure to link those into the description. All right. This last one is not in the original blog post, but as I mentioned earlier, I think it is something that could be really fun, and those are learning stations. [00:12:30] Also known as task cards, but they're not the task cards in the sense where you've got 20 or so short bite-sized tasks and it's maybe a passage and just one question or multiple choice or something like that.

[00:12:43] Kirsten: It's not something that they just do quickly. You could do something where there's six different tasks. And maybe it's related to something they've already learned or it's something they're exploring. Think Bloom's Taxonomy where you've got [00:13:00] six of the different parts of Bloom's Taxonomy. So for these stations, these are something where they're going to sit for about 10 to 15 minutes in that one station completing a task.

[00:13:12] Kirsten: It could be some type of word sort. It could be something related to. Maybe creating a graphic organizers, like some type of cause and effect chart, maybe some type of timeline where they're reordering different events to make sure it is going and [00:13:30] following the exact chronological sequence. So you can pull different parts of what the topic is.

[00:13:39] Kirsten: Maybe let's say American Revolution one Learning Station is focusing on the causes. One is talking about the actual battles. One is talking about life during the American Revolution. One is talking about the effects of the American Revolution, and you can mix and match the different stations. It [00:14:00] doesn't all have to be, you know.

[00:14:02] Kirsten: Matching or multiple choice, but it can be. It depends on how much time you have to plan ahead for this. But I think this could be a really fun way to have students review something they've already learned in class, whether it is, maybe you've spent three weeks talking about a specific subject or topic, and then you have just a whole day where they're rotating through different stations.[00:14:30]

[00:14:30] Kirsten: I'm thinking like. Because I do remember doing this in maybe middle school or high school, where we would have in science, different stations or kind of like science lab stations, where we would go to, you know, three or four different stations and complete the specific tasks. This could be incorporated in social studies as well.

[00:14:50] Kirsten: You can get creative with it. You can even have them maybe design, you know, uh, design an outfit for the American Revolution, like what the soldiers would wear. [00:15:00] I don't know. Just think outside the box and chat. GPT could help you out on this as well. I do have some learning stations that specifically follow Bloom's Taxonomy and one specifically that.

[00:15:14] Kirsten: Is probably or could be super helpful during this time of year are the map skills learning stations. There's six different tasks that students can complete. They're already done for you. They're all set for you. And I also share with you suggestions for how [00:15:30] you can incorporate and utilize these. Tasks or stations with your students.

[00:15:36] Kirsten: So this could be a nice day where after you've talked about map skills, you do the learning stations, and then you might have some type of summative assessment, wrapping the whole unit up. If you happen to have my guided curriculum, you could also take any of the units, doesn't matter which unit it is.

[00:15:55] Kirsten: There are always practice activities with each of the lessons. [00:16:00] So usually the lessons will be ranging from four to 14 guided note lessons, and then there's a review day, and then the assessment and project. There's usually gonna be a practice activity after that specific lesson. What you could do is if you don't get to all the practice activities, here's an example, map and globe skills unit.

[00:16:23] Kirsten: You might've done the slides showing guided notes, and you might've done an exit ticket, but you didn't really have time to do all the [00:16:30] practice activities that are included. What you could do is pull a few of those different practice activities and let's say one on cardinal directions. That's one learning station, one on intermediate directions, that's one learning station, and maybe one on matching the different types of maps.

[00:16:48] Kirsten: That's another learning station, so you could use those practice activities. They're already there for you. If you save those for later and maybe not use them with each guided lesson in the guided curriculum. [00:17:00] Take a day and just work on the practice activities all in one go. So that could be super easy and fun to implement.

[00:17:07] Kirsten: So let me know if you end up trying it out, how it goes for you. All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode full of ideas and hopefully it got your brain. Thinking about ways you can make social studies fun for your students, and low prep for you. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day, and I will talk to you again next time.

[00:17:29] Kirsten: [00:17:30] Thanks for listening to the Social Studies Teacher podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, hit that subscribe button and leave a review. I would love to hear your thoughts. You can also find me on Instagram at the Southern Teach. I can't wait for you to join me in the next episode for more teacher tips and strategies.