Our third-grade students do a large unit on the Native Americans. It begins with the study of the Iroquois Indians in New York and finishes with an independent research project on a specific tribe in North America. As part of this interdisciplinary unit, they work on a series of projects to support their understanding of our native people. This includes a variety of art projects, as well as a multimedia presentation using information and technology to demonstrate their knowledge of the hardships the Native Americans endured at the hands of European explorers and the United States government.
Source: ASIDE, 2011
As a further extension of this unit, the students analyze the poetry from the book The Circle of Thanks: Native American Poems and Songs of Thanksgiving by Joseph Bruchac. The book contains fourteen poems with themes of thanksgiving and the appreciation of nature based in part on traditional songs and prayers. The students learn that these works from the different American Indian cultures celebrate the aspects of creation and the natural resources that were so crucial for their survival and sustainability.
Source: ASIDE
For us, it is important that our students make the connection that Native Americans lived off the land and had a great respect for its gifts. Giving thanks for nature was ingrained in the culture of the American Indians. Their deference for the earth’s resources was unending, much like the continuous line of a circle or ever-winding line of a spiral.
For each of the poems in the book, the students deciphered the meaning to understand the importance of nature to the different tribes. They created the spiraled art you see here to design their own way of expressing why things such as the sun, wind and rain were so significant. The students learned that American Indians were continually grateful, especially for the plants and animals that gave them food and medicine. Each of these designs represents a way of envisioning the information from the poems, as well as embodying their way of personalizing the content.
Source: ASIDE
The spiral itself denotes a line that continues in the same way that the Native Americans think of nature as an unbroken need for life. By using the spiral to design the information, the students visually thought about the connection between it and the continued thanks for the environment that the American Indians tried to instill in their cultures.
December is typically a joyful but chaotic month. Teachers push their final lessons before the holidays, and students are pulled in countless festive directions. We always seem to have 20 minutes of time to fill after Nutcracker assemblies and before bus dismissals. Luckily, the holiday season features all sorts of lively animations to engage students during lulls in class parties. Few of the resources are overtly "educational," but they are fun and harmless -- and with a little invention, they can be connected to overall learning.
Our favorite is Elf Yourself. Back this year and better than ever, the popular novelty is sponsored by OfficeMax and designed by the clever comics from JibJab. You upload a photograph, choose your music, and your face quickly appears on a bouncing elf. The impressive graphics and catchy beats are hilarious. Even though it was intended for e-cards of goofy family members, it can be stretched to fit the classroom. Pick a famous figure from history, such as Rutherford B. Hayes or Napoleon, and turn him into a hip-hop elf. Or reunite rivals Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton to dance the Charleston. As of this writing, 180,782,840 elves had been created so far.
On a more educational plane, PNC bank has updated its presentation of the real price of The Twelve Days of Christmas. How much would it actually cost for three French hens or ten lords-a-leaping? In its Christmas Price Index, PNC did the math, and your students can, too. With sophisticated claymation and games, the visualization is a perfect tool for highlighting financial literacy and percent change over time. Five gold rings are slightly down in value this year, apparently.
For artistic elementary students, Sprint has created The Gingerbread Man With Everything. Beginning with a blank cookie canvas, you decorate your treat in any way you want. With a surprisingly large number of "frostings," colors, sprinkles, and add-ons, the choices are creative and vast. A few pre-designed, whimsical choices are available in the gallery, such as the samurai warrior or cookie viking. This simple, fun activity works great on an interactive whiteboard.
If you have an interactive SMARTboard, there are plenty of other winsome winter resources for the Notebook software. Build Your Own Snowman, Snowflake Designer, and others are prime for younger students. Also, since 1996, Santa.net has offered a range of games and activities in its Santa Animation Station. Students have a choice of playing with cartoons, puzzles, and North Pole music. Mildly silly and endlessly distracting, these holiday resources can help make the season bright.
We just finished three days at the annual conference for the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) in Washington, D.C., with a dedicated group of professionals who shared their hearts and souls about the subject. As educators and learners ourselves, we wanted to thank everyone who so willing provided us with resources and ideas to bring back to our classrooms to make us better teachers.
One of the many highlights at the conference was the keynote address given by Diane Ravitch, who filled the grand ballroom with a packed audience. Her message was clear; we must “preserve the heart, mind, and character of education for our democracy.” The conference was deep and rich in the sheer number of workshops available to attendees, making it at times difficult to choose.
The passion of the presenters came through in their believing that first graders could be entrepreneurs to discussing the role of journalism in a world flooded by technology. The Twitter workshop to promote global sharing of information was also interesting. Many in the group who participate as part of the Social Studies Chat ning had only met each other for the first time at the conference, but had been in constant communication online during the Monday night tweets using the hashtag #sschat.
A special thanks to those who attended our presentation, “Where Financial Literacy Meets Media Literacy: Integrate, Don’t Isolate,” that demonstrated how to blend literacies about money and media into curricular learning through connected skills and content. For links to our projects that integrate branding, advertising, markets, trade, entrepreneurship, and new media, please visit our resource page and our posts on the topic.
If you’re in the DC area and looking for a good place to eat, check out the Cuba Libre restaurant for some excellent food to delight your taste buds. Lastly, thank you to all those at NCSS who made this a fantastic conference to attend.
"Entrepreneurial thinking" is the mind's measure of risk and reward, of creativity and motivation. Young children thrive in this mindset, developing into entrepreneurs through an encouraging school climate. Amid an environment of earned success, they can attain life-long learning through invention, originality, and occasional failure. By fostering an entrepreneurial spirit, educators can inculcate financial literacy and media savvy in students. Specific, teachable skills can fuel initiative and innovation. In our own Kid Entrepreneurs project, we try to build these skills through hands-on, self-directed activities.
One good, beginning resource in entrepreneurship is Sprinkle Lab's "Now I Know" series. These three-minute videos from business leaders offer crisp, candid insights about successes, failures, and lessons-learned. Some of the voices are famous, but many are lesser known. With their brevity, they are easy narratives to layer into daily learning.
Even more helpful for classroom teachers is Cameron Herold's mesmerizing March 2010 talk at TedxEdmonton. Titled "Let's raise kids to be entrepreneurs," Herold paints a compelling portrait of adult actions that would nourish future leaders. A self-described attention-deficit, "low achieving" student, with natural gifts directed in unnatural ways, Herold founded the mentoring firm BackPocket COO after serving as COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK? and VP of Corporate Development at Ubarter.com.
In feisty terms, Herold argues that most parents and teachers do little to nurture self-reliance. For example, he claims that "allowances teach kids the wrong habits," by making them expect a spoon-fed job and a regular paycheck. Instead, parents should teach their children to look around the house for jobs that need doing. Then, they can negotiate the appropriate payment. Looking for opportunities becomes the essence of entrepreneurship.
Herold gives teachers and parents strategies toward raising independent thinkers. He suggests that parents force a habit of saving on young children who don't yet feel the pain of money. He recommends reading stories to children on some nights and having them tell their own stories on other nights. He urges kids to stand up in front of family friends and stage skits.
At the end of the clip, Herold links to a Grasshopper video that we've shown several times in our classes to excite young entrepreneurs. The conversations on the TED site beneath Herold's video are also worth plumbing. For example, one thread features interesting comments around the question: "Are Entrepreneurs Born or Made?" In our classes, we want our students to picture themselves as entrepreneurs, and we use infographics to help them visualize these traits. (Hat tip, by the way, to Jason Henrichs for promoting Herold's video.)
The vast amount of visual stimuli that our students are faced with on a daily basis should remind us of why it is crucial to address the skills needed to be media savvy. It goes without saying that today’s kids see more advertisements from an early age than any other generation in history. As teachers, we continually seek ways to encourage students to look at more to help them notice things that they might take for granted. It is not enough to assume that they have all the skills to deconstruct media messages, or for that matter understand why they were constructed in the first place. By beginning the process of teaching media literacy in the elementary grades, we can give kids a leg up on learning about branding techniques, advertising tricks, and the art of persuasion used to target them as potential consumers. Our method is simple: cereal.
Cereal provides a sound place to start on a strong foundation of prior knowledge. Most children know plenty about it besides just eating one brand or another, and many can recite television commercials, sing jingles, or identify mascots. One of the first things we discuss is what it means to be a consumer. We relate it to eating and how they consume food. Then we take it a step further to talk about consuming information, and lastly how a consumer buys goods and services. It’s easy then to transition into what to look for as a consumer when buying something such as cereal. In our school library, we have a bookshelf full of cereal boxes to use as examples, but three of our favorites to start with are the original, Honey Nut, and Fruity Cheerios brands, a mere three of the eleven brands made by General Mills. This exercise can also be done with other products, using multiple types of a single brand.
The students carefully study each box and look at all the different elements that go into their designs, such as a heart-shaped bowl with a ribbon about cholesterol, a cartoonized honey bee dropping a little bit of sweetness at the same time it uses a stethoscope to check your heart, or rainbow colored rings packed onto an extra large, milk-filled spoon. They learn what a target audience is and whom the advertiser intends to get to buy a particular brand. Is it for adults or kids? Conversations usually lead to many of them making connections to television commercials that talk about heart health or cute little kids wanting breakfast. With lots of other examples for them to see, the conversation quickly turns into a diagnosis of cereal boxes in search for clues on how advertisers manipulate the visual imagery using bright colors, extra large type, prizes, and more.
We keep them engaged by adding a little “Snap, Crackle and Pop” to reinforce what they’ve learned. The students design their own cereal boxes using the Don’t Buy It website by PBS. It's a nice interactive activity to learn the basic aspects of how color selection, celebrities, and name help sell cereal. Another good site for branding cereal is the interactive game called Co-Co’s AdverSmarts. In this game, students have to come up with a new website for Co-Co Crunch cereal by coming up with five gimmicks to promote and market it. For a little more cereal identification, they play Can you name the Cereal Mascots? This timed game to name the sixteen mascots is a sure win, with a little spelling lesson built in to boot.
Talking to kids about cereal is eye opening for them, especially when we show them the typical cereal aisle in any grocery store. By having them analyze the picture to the left, we start the discussion about product placement. Kids are surprised that companies pay for the best spot on the shelf for their brands to be noticed. Where are the brands for them?
Kids get it once they learn what to look for and come away with a whole new level of understanding. They also willingly report back to us on what they have in their own pantries or what they noticed shopping with parents. By paying more attention, they become visually astute at picking up the nuances in branding. We emphasize how important it is to be a “smart consumer” and not to be fooled by advertizing tricks. In other words, kids feel proud and a little more empowered, thinking that they have one up on the marketers.
Many of us grew up with some sort of device featuring book recordings, whether on vinyl 45rpm records or audiotape cassettes, that had little chimes to remind you to turn the page as you followed the story. As these became popular, toy manufacturers such as Fisher Price made child-friendly players for kids. Electronics giants such as Sony and others also jumped into the market, creating their own products such as My First Sony. In other words, kids using technology for learning and fun really hasn’t changed much, but the way they can interact with technology has. Touch screen and tablet computing, particularly the iPad, has been a game changer. The vast number of education “apps” available to educators and parents for children in the preschool years cannot be overlooked in terms of the possibilities for learning.
So do kids learn differently as a result of new technology? You bet they do. At the recent New York State Association for Computers and Technologies in Education (NYSCATE) conference, Steve Dembo, who is Discovery Education’s Director of Social Media Strategy and Online Community, showed the following video clip. A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work. What is telling is how our youngest kids are growing up with devices and doing things using touch screen technology that we could not fathom a decade ago. Is this too much too soon, or the next occupier to keep kids content? We know the warnings about too much television, videos and computer games. Nevertheless, kids are using touch screen devices younger and younger.
To make his point, Steve Dembo also showed the Fisher Price "Laugh & Learn Apptivity Case." This protective case was designed so toddlers could use their parent's iPhone or iPod touch, a far cry from My First Sony. To be sure, there are plenty of skill-and-drill types of applications. But in the growing world of “apps,” the ability to find interactive tools for education that benefit young learners, where they are, is mounting. If we are watching two-year-olds using these applications now, perhaps we should be considering what kindergarten will look like three years from now.
We just wrapped up three days in Rochester at the 2011 annual NYSCATE conference. The New York State Association for Computers and Technologies in Education (NYSCATE) assembled a roster of galvanizing presenters and speakers to empower our students through technology. We met a lot of impressive teachers who shared their savvy and expertise, and we thoroughly enjoyed Diana Laufenberg's keynote address. Some of the particularly valuable workshops we attended focused on web 2.0 accessibility, 21st-century global teaching, and school iPad deployment.
This NYSCATE conference may have been the best-run gathering we've attended in recent years, and it was all done by volunteers. The pacing of the programs and the paperless program app allowed for full but unhurried days. And the little things, like free hotel Wi-Fi, gifts for presenters, welcoming receptions, and helpful tech support all made the conference convivial.
Special thanks to Dave Mileham for organizing the daily details. He was approachable for the most mundane questions and kept the nifty conference app up-to-date.
If you were unable to attend, resources from the conference are available via the #NYSCATE11 hashtag on Twitter or on the NYSCATE ning. Also, if you're in the area and primed for a relaxing, post-tech dinner, check out the escarole and cannellini beans at Pane Vino on N. Water Street.
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