Thanksgiving and Elementary Textbooks

Hmmm...what to teach and what not to teach? I am very surprised at the facts I read about Thanksgiving. I am even more surprised that I am just now finding out about this, at the age of 23. I don't understand how elementary schools can continue to teach material without it being true facts.
I also taught my lesson on the Mayflower Compact to a fourth grade classroom. These students were full of questions about the Pilgrims and all that, but my part was to cover the compact. I was still shocked that the Mayflower and the Pilgrims first Thanksgiving meal was not what I learned back in fourth grade. I observed my mentor teacher talking to the students about Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving and the students were taught about everyone getting along and having a huge meal together. Did this really happen? Were the Pilgrims the first people to settle in the Americas? I am really confused and can't wait to read more about this historical event to answer my questions and more that I am sure will arise.

Social Studies Lesson

I taught my lesson in my field placement on Friday. It was a Social Studies lesson based on the Mayflower Compact.  I did not know that I could come up with activities and games to play with the Mayflower Compact, but I did. I made games for the vocabulary, like majority rules. I made note cards with questions on them . For example, the classroom will be painted one color red or blue? The students that answered in the majority got to stay standing and the rest of the class had to sit down. The students LOVED this! They wanted to play again :) I also went over the Mayflower Compact, I created on in a student friendly text and we compared it to the "real" one. This lesson was observed by my professor and I got so much positive feedback! I am so happy that I could create a lesson that the students enjoyed!

EVEREST

Well.....I'm not going to climb Everest anytime soon but I do find it extremely interesting! I really enjoyed Monday's class on all the facts and stories about people who climbed or atleast atempted. I am going to read that book Into Thin Air and would also like to see the movie. This is on my to do list :)

Social Studies Thoughts

WOW! What we have learned in this class so far! I love all the ideas we have been taught by Dr. Meier to use with our future students.I have enjoyed the process of expanding my own knowledge on social studies. This is a great class and very beneficial to anyone that is going into elementary education.
I want to find links that have something to do with each thing we have done in class to keep it organized and can easily find it :)

Geocaching

Okay learning that my GPS can do something cooler than leading me to my destination is awesome! So my husband and I went to Charleston, SC over Halloween weekend and we tried to Geocach. It was a little hard and we never found any but we tried!
I really want to get one of those dog tag things and use it in my classroom. I love the idea of tracking something on a map. I may have to start local but I would like think it would make it out of TN!

Block CITY!

I LOVE BLOCK CITY! I really can not wait to be a teacher just to use this in my classroom. You could really use this with any age group. I would like to expand on what we did in class and use more businesses and maybe some houses.

This is a great idea to get kids actively involved in learning about maps!