Week 7: Social Studies Unit

This week we began teaching out social studies unit. It was a continued unit on black history month and was specifically about black history through the arts. I have never taught a unit, I have only taught single lessons on their own.

         We taught about three African American artists. On Monday we taught about Bill Robinson, Tuesday we taught about Langston Hughes, and we finished out unit with Duke Ellington. I enjoyed that we were able to connect all three of these people day-to-day and the kids could how us what they remembered from the previous lessons. I loved to watch the students listen to the artists’ songs or watch a video of them and be interested in what they produced.

One tricky thing to me was that we had to keep the lessons consistent to what our teacher did previously during her black history unit. For most of her lessons she taught about the person through a book and a video and then would create a chart encompassing the major ideas about the person. The students would then complete some kind of writing activity to show hat they learned. So we tried to keep this consistent, while still adding in the strategies we had.

Overall, I think the lessons went pretty well. I learned how important it was to find out students previous knowledge as well as be sure I know much about the person or topic we are teaching about. You do not want to teach the students things they already know, or they will be bored. So it is important to differentiate the instruction throughout. It was also important to know about the topic. The students were asking us a lot of specific details about the people. We were able to answer a lot of information but needed to look up some. After the first day, we were sure to bring in the information we found about each person so we could answer him or her to the best of out ability. Teaching a unit took a lot of perpetration but it was a great learning experience and know I can take all that I learned from it and create more units in the future.