Collaborative Inquiry Unit (TLCP): Grade 8 Sustainability Unit

This unit was co-created with my fellow teacher candidate colleagues. I found this experience to be both a refreshing and eye-opening experience. I enjoyed collaborating with my fellow peers and being able to truly generate and bounce ideas off one another and create the ultimate sequential and integrated unit. Below is an attachment of both our group presentation with a link to the overview and brief explanation of each lesson within the sequence:


Sustainable Unit Overview Presentation

A few of the bigger and more important considerations for my group and I were to ensure that our unit and lessons connected, were relevant to the 21st century, and that the students were experiencing a plethora of learning through various medias and hands-on experiences. One of the biggest "aha" moments I had while collaboratively creating this unit was how I would ensure that I was able to successfully monitor students' learning, as well as how could I give students an opportunity to monitor and see their own learning and understandings grow. This was something that I felt was crucial and critical to include within our unit, and so we created the concept of students tracking their learning and new understandings through a digital timeline. This was an important area to ensure we included in the unit because it gives students a digital aspect to their learning/understandings, and allows them to track growth and reflect on their growth and understandings.

Overall, I think this was a great experience and has prepared me quite a bit for my own TLCP and own collaborative inquiry units. Through collaborating with my fellow peers, I learned the insights of other teacher candidates and considerations that they considered and thought about when planning their designated lessons. Through this new insight, I have a larger span of knowledge and a better idea of more concepts and things that I will consider and look at when planning my future units for my classes.  Check out my group's and fellow colleagues collaborative inquiry units below:

Collaborative Inquiry Units

Book Talk Review

Throughout my experience with my Social Studies, Geography, and History course, we have read and summarized an entire textbook: “Elementary Social Studies: A practical approach to teaching and learning”, which I have found to be both helpful and meaningful to my overall practice. The textbook discusses both the evolution of social studies content wise, and the evolution of social studies teaching wise. Both are interesting to learn about and fully understand how they have developed into the practice that we teach throughout the classroom today.

Questions that arose while analyzing the first three chapters of this text consisted of what to teach about Canada? Just white based history? Native American history? And as anyone can see there has most definitely been a change in what teachers teach with social studies as now there are a lot more avenues and areas of interests such as educating students on Black history and Native American history. These areas have now become not only areas of interests for students, but also a new way to create an inclusive classroom. Teaching and incorporating various cultures and aspects of Canada’s geographical and historical development allows students to not only all feel included, but allows for teachers to teach inclusion and prevent prejudice and racism from occurring within the classroom.

Furthermore, social studies can also be looked at in five different lights: as a social science, as a reflective inquiry, as a citizenship transmission, as a critical reflection, and as a holistic education. I think that being able to connect all five of these outlooks with social studies is how teachers should aim to teach, and guide their lessons and inquiry. In my personal opinion, students will make a much stronger connection to their learning if they are genuinely interested in what they are learning and researching. To make this effective, I think by including and ensuring that the five different conceptions above make for interesting lesson and student centred lessons.

Overall, the social studies book by Ian Wright and David Hutchison, used to guide our understanding during the EDUC 8Y29 course definitely is a useful and inspiring one to properly guide and shape our understandings of what Canadian social studies, geography, and history should look like within the classroom.


For more information regarding other chapter summaries from this textbook please visit the google doc below:   

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1WkLmE8JLu3cF_rZTB3_CYIAqWAIi09ZpM6L7X1wUOYQ/edit#slide=id.g6d462cf21_164

Social Justice and Sustainability!

Social Justice and Sustainability in Grade 8:

These two key ideas link extremely well to one another. Sustainability involves using things such as renewable resources, and alternative means for being "green" and eco-friendly to our Earth. Social Justice can be integrated within this unit in Grade 8 because we can encourage and equip students with the knowledge to become eco-friendly citizens. This can be done by ensuring small, simple things are being done properly to encourage and see tidbits of sustainability within the classroom such as: recycling, minimizing the usage of lights (where possible), and turning off computer monitors. The above things could be demonstrated and executed in the junior grades. Whereas with the intermediate grades, students can be able to think more globally and how their footprint impacts the community, province, country, and nationally. This is an opportunity to move away from the smaller areas that students can aid our Earth, and to begin to look at things through a more national/global lens. The result is to encourage students to think globally and how we can live harmoniously with the Earth, by making good use of our renewable resources.



There are three resources that I have found to be important:


http://www.canadiangeographic.ca/atlas/intro.aspx?lang=En



The above resource explores all aspects of Canada from a geographical standpoint, as well as elicits information about specific cities, their resources, and such. This resource can be useful to students because it allows them to search and draw their own conclusions about resources, the communities that surround them, and how these resources contribute to either an eco-friendly/sustainable country, or a wasteful/polluted country.




https://www.brainpop.com/science/ourfragileenvironment/

Brainpop is a fun and interactive resource where students can have more fun, and be educated through useful videos, and various informative information. This puts a creative, interactive, and fun spin on learning and allows students to explore using the interactive tools that this website has to offer!





http://www.sustainabilitystore.com/sustainable.html

The last resource I would encourage students to use and seek for information is the above resource which discusses global issues involving all forms of sustainability, and even includes concepts such as fair trade, organics, etc. This source also links relevant forms of media such as blogs and news articles relating and pertaining to both sustainability and an eco-friendly Earth.





Social justice can easily be incorporated into all forms of geography, history, and social studies in the primary/junior grades. It is important to link these two areas because this allows students to see the “bigger picture” and become a well rounded global citizen. As students move through the grades, the focus/emphasis on sustainability and social justice becomes less of a personal and small community aspect, and grows into a provincial, national and global aspect, where students can examine various provinces and their initiatives, globally what are various countries doing to become eco-friendly, and to decrease their ecological footprint. Overall, social justice combined with social studies, history, and geography allows students to take on many different lenses and perspectives from various standpoints within the community, provincially, nationally, and globally. The end result is creating informed, educated, global citizens!

Welcome Parents!

Dear Parents and/or Guardians:

 

This letter is to inform you that your child will be starting a grade 8 Geography unit on sustainability. To make learning more meaningful and to ensure your child is an informed global citizen, the intermediate teachers have organized a variety of Geography units that are related to the current events happening in our world.

                Students will be engaging in various activities such as debates, writing letters, opinion pieces as well as other tasks on their views and research done on sustainability. I will be encouraging the students to keep up to date with any relevant and current information pertaining to this unit. As a parent and/or guardian, I would like you to encourage your child to engage in current events at home to help foster an informed and global citizen.

Students will be analysing some of the ways in which the physical environment has influenced settlement patterns in different countries and/or regions around the world, describe possible features of a sustainable community in the future, formulate questions to guide investigations into issues related to the interrelationship between human settlement and sustainability from a geographic perspective. Students will also be responsible for gathering and organizing data and information from a variety of sources and using various technologies to investigate issues related to the interrelationship between human settlement and sustainability from a geographic perspective, and evaluating evidence and draw conclusions about issues related to the interrelationship between human settlement and sustainability.     

Please feel free to stay informed through accessing my blog, which will be updated daily: http://missfossey.blogspot.ca/. Additionally, I’d ask for you to take a few minutes to explore the following websites with your child regarding sustainability and Canada:

http://www.canadiangeographic.ca/atlas/LessonPlan_Pdf/ON6-8_Sustainability.pdf

http://www.agr.gc.ca/eng/about-us/planning-and-reporting/sustainable-development/?id=1175526032952

Should you have any questions, comments or concerns please feel free to contact me.
Thank you for your cooperation and constant involvement in your child’s education.

Sincerely,

 

Miss. Lisa Fossey

Inquiry Based Learnng with Social Studies

The new social studies curriculum document has opened the up the inquiry-based notion of learning. I had the privilege of creating my own inquiry-based unit in social studies during my first block. Immediately I felt overwhelmed and challenged because my classroom had a substantial lack of technology. In addition to this, I felt a bit ill-equipped because the grade 6 class also did not have any relevant social studies textbook because the curriculum had changed. It was not until roughly half way through the unit that I realized that I was not teaching social studies, my students were most definitely learning, but I was not teaching. I also realized I did not need a textbook to guide my teaching instruction because the students were doing that for me through their inquiry process. The unit was structured so that each social studies class was building and allowing them to accomplish something towards their culminating activity. One class would show a brief clip on a Canadian community, a guided group discussion occurred and then students began to create questions based on what they wanted to know more of based on that community. The video clips were short in length but thought provoking. The following class, students would be given secondary sourced information to search for answers to their questions. Students who still had questions unanswered were granted the opportunity to go to the computer lab to find the answers, and then share their findings with the class. I guided the students’ thought process, and ensured they stayed on track, but the students created and directed their own learning based on inquiry. This was a huge learning experience for me, and reassured me of the importance of inquiry-based learning, and how easily it can be executed from a social studies standpoint. The students’ final culminating task was to pick a Canadian community of their choice and to do research on it, create a Q-chart full of various questions and to answer those questions,  and to “pack a suitcase” with the items they would bring and why, based on their research. Students were given free range for their culminating task, and had already prior experience with Q-charts, research, and what to look for when trying to describe a community. Overall, this was an excellent opportunity to allow me to teach outside of the box, and to not conduct myself in a similar way that I had been taught growing up.  I think inquiry-based learning is great for students, and I have seen many positive outcomes with my own students. This will be a form of learning I will attempt to incorporate in other subject areas; it can have such an empowering role on the students because they are taking ownership for their learning. Below are some of the video links I used to introduce the Canadian communities we discussed as a class:

Winnipeg, Manitoba: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_xfu7Tl3AA

Attawapiskat, Ontario: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ynaC8f5ues

Fort McMurrary, Alberta: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIFciS63s9E

Quebec City, Quebec: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSNLydguFl8

As one can see, each video clip is a clear contrast from the other, and this was another way of encouraging students to dig deeper, as well as to show them different perspectives and points of view, and how they can influence what one thinks of a particular subject matter, or in this case a place!