Category: Simple Strategies

You heard me–I’m bringing crafts to high school history class. Pop-ups aren’t just for babies anymore. I’m an equal-opportunity popper. At first, they complain. “We’re not in second grade.”  But slowly, they get into it, and what’s more, they remember it. We’re not just cutting to pass the time. There’s a method to my madness–a

Busy Monday. I don’t know about the rest of you, but we are back with a vengeance at my school. A vengeance. I did manage to crawl out from under a pile of paperwork today to have a guest speaker in Sociology. She is a social worker from a local group home. At first, I

A week and a half and the honeymoon’s already over. The students are getting comfortable, and their true personalities have emerged. I’m okay with that, though. This is when it gets interesting. Not one of my sociology students was prepared for the test today, I realized, as we were playing the review game. It was

Sounds daunting, right? Well, it is, a little, when you’re first starting out. These things have been around since the 70s (so the technology involved is a xerox machine and a bottle of glue–no dittos, please), but they seem to be all the rage, lately. I have been teaching for 13 years now, seven of

So, I’ve taught social studies for going on 7 years. But before that, I taught English. As an English-turned-social-studies-teacher, when I first embarked on the ever daunting world history course, I put an inordinate amount of time and thought into vocabulary. We all remember it from high school–the social studies vocabulary lists. Remember? It could