Central Concepts in Social Studies... breaking down the issues.
Brett Bezaire, November 13th, 2102.
“Children need to have multiple and engaging multi-sensorial experiences to ensure sounds understanding.”
Have you ever heard of the expression “we learn with our hands”? This is true for me as
my entire life I struggled to learn from books and lectures. I needed something
to hold, see and manipulate to understand a new concept. This came up in my
education placements when I was tasked with teaching grade sixes how to do
geometric transformations (Something I remember struggling with in grade
school ). Lets list my teaching possibilities:
1) Lecture to the class on how to slide, flip, and rotate;
2) Let the class experiment with their textbook; or
3) Give the class manipulatives such as wooden shapes that they can actually slide flip and rotate on their own desk!
This decision was simple and the children grasped the concept best when I combined all of these strategies together and worked with them to help them solve their own problems. This concept can be related to chapter 5 in “Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers” which breaks down important concepts into smaller segments. It is about building a foundation (ex) “I live in a town.”), and then expanding on that foundation until we understand our entire society and culture. I live in town, part of a province, part of a country, part of the world. It is impossible to understand everything at once so we as teachers must do our best to help students achieve to the best of their abilities by simplifying a concept before diving in head first into a sea of both the logical and illogical realities of our world and its diverse cultures.
Have you ever heard of the expression “we learn with our hands”? This is true for me as
my entire life I struggled to learn from books and lectures. I needed something
to hold, see and manipulate to understand a new concept. This came up in my
education placements when I was tasked with teaching grade sixes how to do
geometric transformations (Something I remember struggling with in grade
school ). Lets list my teaching possibilities:
1) Lecture to the class on how to slide, flip, and rotate;
2) Let the class experiment with their textbook; or
3) Give the class manipulatives such as wooden shapes that they can actually slide flip and rotate on their own desk!
This decision was simple and the children grasped the concept best when I combined all of these strategies together and worked with them to help them solve their own problems. This concept can be related to chapter 5 in “Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers” which breaks down important concepts into smaller segments. It is about building a foundation (ex) “I live in a town.”), and then expanding on that foundation until we understand our entire society and culture. I live in town, part of a province, part of a country, part of the world. It is impossible to understand everything at once so we as teachers must do our best to help students achieve to the best of their abilities by simplifying a concept before diving in head first into a sea of both the logical and illogical realities of our world and its diverse cultures.