Category: Social Studies
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Newsela Vote 2016 & our feature on NBC!
Our fifth grade Little Longhorns have been actively engaged in this year’s presidential election! We have been diving into deep, critical conversations revolving around both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Our fifth graders have had astounding debates and conversations, deliberating questions such as: “Would a candidate’s moral character affect their ability to be president?,” as well as discussing…
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Historical Thinking in the 5th Grade
What do our historical knowledge do our fifth graders bring into the classroom with them? How do our kids make sense of the worlds around them? These are the questions we set out to answer last week in our historical thinking unit. Part I: Timelines At the beginning of the year, I recreated our…
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Challenging the Dominant Narrative
This year in Ms. Green’s class, we’ve started a conversation that will last the whole year. We’re talking about what it means to challenge the dominant narrative. The dominant narrative is the story that’s usually told, and that most people are comfortable hearing. In a US history context, this dominant narrative says that rich white…
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Newsela & The Primary Election
As many of our readers know, we had the privilege of being filmed by our very own cameraman, the one and only Joe Salinas, during our exploration of the primary election via Newsela Vote. (If you’re interested in exactly what we did, here’s the blog post we used for our research.) Newsela is one of…
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Is the United States Guilty of Genocide?
Did the American government commit genocide against the Native American people? That’s the hot topic we will be discussing today in Ms. Green’s class. We learned about genocide earlier this year, remember? Genocide is the tip-top of the Pyramid of Hate. (This poster is still hanging on our wall, but here’s a reminder for…
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Do Teachers Make Enough Money? 5th Grade Financial Advisors
We have been learning about financial literacy, that is, how to successfully navigate through the world of money. Today we are going to do some research into teacher salaries, and will be taking an inside look into a very relevant debate: do teachers in the United States make enough money? You will be researching different sides…
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The 2016 Primary Election
Today in Ms. Green’s class, we are taking part in one of the most important events in our country: the primary election! Together we will be researching our Republican and Democratic candidates, and then participating in Newsela Vote 2016. First, let’s discover our political parties. There are two major political parties in the United States…
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What Messages are Toy Marketers Sending to Boys and Girls?
Oh how we love inquiry based learning here in Ms. Green’s class! Every Friday, we watch Flocabulary‘s The Week in Rap, a weekly news segment presented in a three to four minute rap. We watch the video once, then a second time, and the kids are asked to hold on to a comment or a question…
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Slavery, Apologies, and Stumbling Through the 5th Grade
I love teaching social studies. I love it because I believe that it really, truly, matters. I love teaching it, but there is so much of it that I just don’t know. In my first year of teaching, with each unit I struggle to just stay one step ahead of my students and the curriculum…
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Analyzing Poetry with John Legend & Common
My fifth graders did not do so hot on the poetry section of their middle of year benchmark. I can rage about standardized tests all I want, but at the end of the day, our sweet kiddos have to pass. So I was faced with the choice between doing STAAR practice, or finding a creative…
Ms. Green's Class 