Crash Course Video Series
Monday, March 25, 2013
Crash Course Videos RULE!!!
So far this video series is entirely accurate, engaging and entertaining. Although I am personally fond of the World History series there are series focusing on: Biology, US History, Ecology and Literature.
Crash Course Video Series
Crash Course Video Series
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Saturday, March 16, 2013
Monday, March 11, 2013
Why Study History? Timelines and Oral History, Lesson Plan
Learning Objectives
understand that their lifetime represents a small piece of history
make connections between important events in the histories of their families and larger historical events
take an oral history
compare and contrast two or more accounts of the same event
write an account of an event which synthesizes eyewitness testimony from two or more sources
Introduction questions: Use before and after, compare answers.
What is the past, and why is it important?
How do we learn about events in the past?
How are historical accounts influenced by the biases of eyewitnesses?
Activities
1. What is History?
Explain that the past means things that have already happened. Ask someone to tell an event from yesterday's history. Next, ask students to relate events from last year. Once all students seem to understand the meaning of "the past," ask for a few students to tell an event from when they were babies. Do they remember these events? If not, how do they know about them?
Refer back to the events from yesterday that have been listed. Just as the class has a history, each family also has an important history made up of events from the past. Have students brainstorm some events in their families’ histories. Examples might include births, deaths, marriages, immigrations, graduations, vacations, bar/bat mitzvahs, adoptions, moves, opening of a family business, etc. Be sure to reinforce that every family is different, and therefore, every family will have different events in its past that make up its history.
Demonstrate a timeline using events from your own family history. Write the events and the dates and have the students help you put them in chronological order. Working in conjunction with someone at home, each child should create a family timeline that contains 5-7 events from his/her own family history. Young students can have an adult scribe for them, but they should be familiar with the events that are included on their timeline.
2. Class Timeline
Prior to this lesson, you will need to collect all of the family timelines to determine the oldest event and prepare your class timeline. Students, who are able, can write some of the details, especially the year, on a sticky note or note card. On a roll of butcher paper, create the timeline by marking the years at uniform intervals 8-12 inches apart, depending on how many events you have and how many years you need to include. A physically long timeline will help students to understand the distant events, but it still needs to be manageable.
Have each student briefly share his/her timeline with the class. Point out the differences between families and the events that they chose to include. Ask questions that will help the children put time in perspective such as "Who has an event that happened this year? Who has an event that happened before they were born? I was born in ____; who has an event that happened before I was born?"
Show the children the timeline you have prepared. Depending on the size, it may be necessary to take it into the hallway or gymnasium to roll it out. Explain that while one important event is happening for one family, a different event may be happening at the same time to another family. We will put all of our events on this one timeline so that we can see how they are all related. One at a time, have students place their events on the timeline in either chronological or reverse order.
In order to add a wider perspective, you might want to include events from the larger world on your timeline. The EDSITEment-reviewed resource Internet Public Library has a link to This Day in History. You can find events for any day and search under categories such as entertainment, crime, or general interest, or by time periods such as Civil War and Cold War. Students might enjoy finding an event that occurred on their birthday or other important date from their timeline.
Once all the events are on the timeline, help students make visual comparisons of events as follows. Have a student walk the timeline to look for patterns, then have a student stand at the "present" end of the timeline and make an observation. For example, "We were all born pretty close together, but our parents were born at many different times." Students can visually "see" the past on this timeline. If they stand at the end of the timeline—the present—they can see that all the events in their lifetime are close to where they stand, but events such as the birth of a parent, or the year a grandparent immigrated to this country, are far away.
3. Oral Histories - Perspectives
Students will explore how the stories that comprise our history are developed. Two interviews or accounts of the same event will be shared, each with half of the class. Students should take notes on their account to use for retelling the events as a class. How are the accounts the same, how are they different? Why might the stories be different? Some possibilities are that each person remembers different details, or that certain parts of the story were more important to one person than to the other.
Also discuss stories that are very similar. Why aren't there many differences in the two accounts? What does this tell us about history? How do history books get written? The work of an historian is to gather information from many places, including primary sources, and to create an official written account.
Based off of EDSITEment Lesson Plan by Amanda Hoffman, Why Study History? Timelines and Oral History. Retrieved from: http://edsitement.neh.gov/lesson-plan/what-history-timelines-and-oral-histories#sect-thebasics.
understand that their lifetime represents a small piece of history
make connections between important events in the histories of their families and larger historical events
take an oral history
compare and contrast two or more accounts of the same event
write an account of an event which synthesizes eyewitness testimony from two or more sources
Introduction questions: Use before and after, compare answers.
What is the past, and why is it important?
How do we learn about events in the past?
How are historical accounts influenced by the biases of eyewitnesses?
Activities
1. What is History?
Explain that the past means things that have already happened. Ask someone to tell an event from yesterday's history. Next, ask students to relate events from last year. Once all students seem to understand the meaning of "the past," ask for a few students to tell an event from when they were babies. Do they remember these events? If not, how do they know about them?
Refer back to the events from yesterday that have been listed. Just as the class has a history, each family also has an important history made up of events from the past. Have students brainstorm some events in their families’ histories. Examples might include births, deaths, marriages, immigrations, graduations, vacations, bar/bat mitzvahs, adoptions, moves, opening of a family business, etc. Be sure to reinforce that every family is different, and therefore, every family will have different events in its past that make up its history.
Demonstrate a timeline using events from your own family history. Write the events and the dates and have the students help you put them in chronological order. Working in conjunction with someone at home, each child should create a family timeline that contains 5-7 events from his/her own family history. Young students can have an adult scribe for them, but they should be familiar with the events that are included on their timeline.
2. Class Timeline
Prior to this lesson, you will need to collect all of the family timelines to determine the oldest event and prepare your class timeline. Students, who are able, can write some of the details, especially the year, on a sticky note or note card. On a roll of butcher paper, create the timeline by marking the years at uniform intervals 8-12 inches apart, depending on how many events you have and how many years you need to include. A physically long timeline will help students to understand the distant events, but it still needs to be manageable.
Have each student briefly share his/her timeline with the class. Point out the differences between families and the events that they chose to include. Ask questions that will help the children put time in perspective such as "Who has an event that happened this year? Who has an event that happened before they were born? I was born in ____; who has an event that happened before I was born?"
Show the children the timeline you have prepared. Depending on the size, it may be necessary to take it into the hallway or gymnasium to roll it out. Explain that while one important event is happening for one family, a different event may be happening at the same time to another family. We will put all of our events on this one timeline so that we can see how they are all related. One at a time, have students place their events on the timeline in either chronological or reverse order.
In order to add a wider perspective, you might want to include events from the larger world on your timeline. The EDSITEment-reviewed resource Internet Public Library has a link to This Day in History. You can find events for any day and search under categories such as entertainment, crime, or general interest, or by time periods such as Civil War and Cold War. Students might enjoy finding an event that occurred on their birthday or other important date from their timeline.
Once all the events are on the timeline, help students make visual comparisons of events as follows. Have a student walk the timeline to look for patterns, then have a student stand at the "present" end of the timeline and make an observation. For example, "We were all born pretty close together, but our parents were born at many different times." Students can visually "see" the past on this timeline. If they stand at the end of the timeline—the present—they can see that all the events in their lifetime are close to where they stand, but events such as the birth of a parent, or the year a grandparent immigrated to this country, are far away.
3. Oral Histories - Perspectives
Students will explore how the stories that comprise our history are developed. Two interviews or accounts of the same event will be shared, each with half of the class. Students should take notes on their account to use for retelling the events as a class. How are the accounts the same, how are they different? Why might the stories be different? Some possibilities are that each person remembers different details, or that certain parts of the story were more important to one person than to the other.
Also discuss stories that are very similar. Why aren't there many differences in the two accounts? What does this tell us about history? How do history books get written? The work of an historian is to gather information from many places, including primary sources, and to create an official written account.
Based off of EDSITEment Lesson Plan by Amanda Hoffman, Why Study History? Timelines and Oral History. Retrieved from: http://edsitement.neh.gov/lesson-plan/what-history-timelines-and-oral-histories#sect-thebasics.
Saturday, March 9, 2013
Lesson Videos
Education Portal has three different free educational courses in history as well as other subjects. Videos are cute and usually relatively short, around 10 min. Most dialog is easily at a middle or upper elementary level, especially with pauses and explanations. Courses and Videos
Adaptable Classroom Wall Timeline
A Clothesline Timeline
| Subjects: Arts & Humanities, Educational Technology, Holidays, Language Arts, Mathematics, Measurement, Social Studies, U.S. History, Visual Arts ... so any! |
| Grades: All |
Brief Description
Students create a clothesline timeline whatever events, eras or images are relevant.
Materials Needed
- clothesline (distinctive color yarn and push pins) however long as you need, make sure to space out the pushpins fairly regularly to support the clothesline and the material to be placed on it.
- clothespins
- index cards or paper cut to index-card size, glue or hang these from the clothespins to the timeline with years.
- additional color coded yarn can be used to organize information along the time line and separate specific eras.
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
East to West Documentary Series
Episode 4 – The Muslim Renaissance
In this film we will reveal how a golden age of invention and scholarship thrived in the Islamic World at a time when Europe lingered in a dark age; how Muslim scholars brought together for the first time the ideas of the Greeks and Romans with Persian and Indian mathematics and astronomy and developed it into the beginnings of modern Science. We will reveal the first contacts by which European scholars discovered this treasury of knowledge and how it was developed by generations of Arab-admirers (including Galileo & Copernicus) into modern science.
This episode focuses on the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the great university mosques of Cairo and uncovers ancient documents translated in Baghdad by Islamic scholars, now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
Retrieved from: http://www.sbs.com.au/documentary/program/911
In this film we will reveal how a golden age of invention and scholarship thrived in the Islamic World at a time when Europe lingered in a dark age; how Muslim scholars brought together for the first time the ideas of the Greeks and Romans with Persian and Indian mathematics and astronomy and developed it into the beginnings of modern Science. We will reveal the first contacts by which European scholars discovered this treasury of knowledge and how it was developed by generations of Arab-admirers (including Galileo & Copernicus) into modern science.
This episode focuses on the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the great university mosques of Cairo and uncovers ancient documents translated in Baghdad by Islamic scholars, now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
Retrieved from: http://www.sbs.com.au/documentary/program/911
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