Imagine Sandy Koufax pitching without ever throwing a curveball or Gordon Ramsey cooking without pepper. Social Studies teachers are facing similar challenges teaching this year without having students work together in groups easily. Collaboration, conversation, and the exchange of ideas are essential to Social Studies so social distancing, desk shields, and masks make the “social” part of Social Studies difficult to manage, but as Ms. Nigro and Ms. Marshall discovered, not impossible. With headphones, earbuds, and microphones, they were able to team up remote students with those in both of their classrooms in Google Meets to act as historians trying to interpret objects in a colonial house.
4th graders at Lafayette Avenue School are introduced to Social Scientists at the start of the school year to discover what can be learned about how people live their lives as individuals and in groups through the eyes of an economist, political scientist, geographer, and historian. They then use the “lens” of these social scientists in each region of the United States. This lesson has them working as an historian trying to understand how people lived their lives in colonial america.
Thomas and Elizabeth Springer and their children lived in Delaware in the 1700s. The National Museum of American History collected scans and images of some of their possessions and compiled them into an interactive learning experience called "
You be the Historian". Students analyze items from the Springer’s house and family documents, looking for clues from which they can make inferences and conclusions about life in colonial America. Ms. Nigro and Ms. Marshall teamed up students so they could go through the exercise in groups, talking with each other in online conferences while clicking through the website. After they made their guesses, the site provided feedback and more information, giving them the chance to learn how historians work. Because they could talk through their thinking and exchange ideas, students were thoroughly engaged in the lesson, which might not be the way their parents remember Social Studies when they were young.
