Chapter23


 * Chapter 23: Engaging Students in Learning History**
 * Essential Question: How can teachers engage students in learning about history?

__Teaching Strategies for Increasing Student Interest__
 * Games and activities: crossword puzzles, word searches, fill-in-the-blanks and trivia games.
 * These are useful activities to keep students occupied but they do not encourage student learning.

__Traditional Engaging and Potentially Effective Strategies__
 * Activities: films, field trips, debates, posters, mind maps and timelines.
 * These activities do have the potential to engage students and sncourage them to think critically about history, however they fail to engage student's historical imagination.

__Less Traditional Engaging, Imaginative, and Effective Strategies__
 * Activities: postcards, creating an obituary or a eulogy, playing tableaux, role-playing, creating mind maps, stepping into history, etc.
 * When learning about history, students must be able to think critically while using their historic imagination.

To be a successful history teacher, one needs to see the value in learning about history and has to make it fun for their students. Children of all ages want to be challenged but yet still want to have an understanding about what they are learning. We need to work together to create classrooms that are more imagination and experimental friendly because if we want the children in our classroom to be engaged in history we have to show them ideas that are interesting to them.

//__Class Activity- "Who Am I"__

Explanation of the activity//
 * Each person will receive an index card with an important person in Canadian history, past and present.
 * Each person will be paired up by the teacher.
 * The pair will put their index cards on their partners back WITHOUT them seeing the information written on the card.
 * The pairs will ask questions back and forth, using yes or no answers, to find out what important person they have on the index card on their back.

//Playing the activity//
 * The pairs ask questions back and forth until each person has indentified their important Canadian.

//Activity wrap-up//
 * Gather the students together for a class discussion.
 * Each student will get a sticky note and decide five categories that they fit into (ie. artists, athletes, etc.) and post the sticky notes on the chart paper.
 * As a class, we will observe the categories and list them on the whiteboard.

__Curriculum Connection__


 * Grade** **1:** This activity is a little more difficult to use for the grade one Social Studies focus on families. Most grade one students cannot read sentences so you would have to use pictures. An idea could be to learn about all the students' grandparents or great-grandparents and use their pictures and a few key words to describe them such as where they were born and what occupation they had. Learning about their family's history can be very important for students' development of themselves.
 * Grade 2:** In a grade two classroom, this activity could be done using landmarks within the students local communities. Students could tour around historical places in the community to get to know about them. To play the game there could be a picture of the building or place on their back and a description of why it was so historical using pictures and words.
 * Grade 3:** In a grade three classroom, this activity could be done by using people from other communities as grade three Social Studies is all about comparing communities. Students could be shown pictures of First Nations people, Metis people, Inuit people, Hispanic people, Chinese people, African American people, etc. and given a short description about them.
 * Grade 4:** The curriculum for grade four has focused, in the past, on Saskatchewan. The students would begin by doing research on a Saskatchewan resident of their choice from the past or the present. The people in the "Who Am I" activity would be Saskatchewan residents' that they have researched. This activity does not have to be used for people only but could be used for finding out information about Saskatchewan resources, etc.
 * Grade 5:** The emphasis of grade five Social Studies is learning about Canada. The activity we did with the class today called "Who Am I?" could typically be done with grade five students as all of the important people included are part of Canadian history (both past and present).