Teaching Social Studies can be hard!

Social Studies is not one of my strongest points. There are some topics that I know very little about, and so it can be difficult to teach students about different Social Studies subjects. A wise and very talented teacher (yes, my fiance, Patrick) has shared with me an idea that he uses to teach Science in his class. Sometimes, we have to do our own research before teaching, because we don't fully understand the material ourselves. Why not teach our students how to do proper research!

So, this teacher I mentionned before, he uses the specific expectations and the big ideas from the curriculum. He gives his students the big idea, offers them various resources such as computers, his iPod or iPhone and various science books and textbooks. Using these tools, the students have to try and find information that will help them understand the big ideas and then explain it to others.

That is exactly what I did for Social Studies. We discussed together as a class the meaning of the word region. Once we did a few examples and students understood the meaning of this word, I split the class up into three groups. Each group was given a different region of Ontario to research:
1) Le Bouclier Canadien (The Canadian Shield)
2) Les Basse-Terres de la Baie d'Hudson (The Hudson Bay lowlands)
3) Les Basses-Terres du Saint-Laurent (The St-Lawrence lowlands)

Each group received different articles about their region that I found online. I gave them French and English articles. Translating is an important skill to learn in French Immersion, so as long as the students translated the information from the Englih articles, I was completely ok with that. The students also had access to the class computers, my iPad and iPhone. Some students even brought in their own iPods to do their research and to use the translating app that the class is using on my Apple equipment.

On a piece of chart paper, the students wrote down what they thought was the important information about their region. I gave them two periods of 40 minutes to work on this, consistently encouraging them to speak in French while discussing. Once the work was complete, I made enough copies of the anchor chart for each member of the groups.

This next part of the activity was the hardest, and the students will require more training to make it work properly. I split the students into five new groups. In each group, there was one person from each region. They had to use their own copy of the anchor chart in order to teach the others about their region. Some kids froze and didn't know what to do, so I sat with them and used some words on their anchor chart as prompts to help them out.

Here are some pictures of my lovely bunch hard at work! :)