Integrating the Visual Arts in Social Studies
Exhibited by:
PLO LEARNINGS:
We addressed a wide-range of strategies and highlights from the passport curriculum that covered a wide-range of age groups, and were often easily adaptable. I used a great number of the activities we tried directly in the classroom. Some highlights include:
• We learned how to teach primary and secondary sources through more hands-on activities, such flash debates, artifact boxes, art projects, and visual analyzes.
• We also examined strategies for reading and comprehending primary sources, such as “Stop, Think, Wonder.”
• We analyzed how to make cross-curricular connections between Social Studies and other content areas.
• We discussed how to incorporate current events and difficult present-day topics—one strategy included having students create political cartoons that reflected issues in the present-day.
• We discussed how to make Social Studies culturally relevant and responsive to all students by allotting time for discussions and projects designed around students learning about their own families’ histories.
IMPLEMENTATION OF TECHNIQUES & PRACTICES:
• Design a Viking Ship: the idea for this activity came straight from the Passport curriculum, and I was encouraged after seeing multiple examples of how to lead creative Social Studies activities in the PLO. To increase the rigor for my students, I added an evidence finding graphic organizer and written response justifying students’ ship design. After reading two primary sources of Viking sagas (Egil’s Saga and Harold’s Sagas), students need to pull evidence of descriptive details from the primary sources into the graphic organizer. Then, they sketched a design for their ship based on text evidence before actually illustrating the ship. Finally, they wrote a paragraph response justifying the design of the ship based on text evidence.
• I felt this was a more creative and engaging way to cover some essential Social Studies skills: reading primary sources and citing evidence to support comprehension. Students were still engaged in those core evidence selecting skills, but they were able to showcase their understanding of the text and their evidence by visualizing and illustrating the primary source.
• Visualization is also an important skill to comprehending primary sources: students need to learn how to visualize primary source texts in the same way they visualize ELA narrative texts in order to increase their comprehension. Engaging in a visual arts activity is a good way to develop this comprehension skill in a hands-on way.
IMPACT and DATA:
• Students’ interest in Social Studies has increased immensely thanks to the engaging activities and strategies I learned in “Engaging All Students in Social Studies, K-5.” Many students have indicated that Social Studies is one of their favorite subjects; they enjoy the variety and opportunity to work on group projects. The specific Viking activity also supported fundamental ELA and Social Studies skills in terms of citing evidence. Based on RALLY practice data, RI.5.1 “Quote accurately from a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text,” was a standard my students struggled with. They had difficulty selecting relevant evidence from the text and explaining how it helped support their answer. This learning activity from the PLO helped students to break down the steps involved with selecting evidence, enabled them to visualize the process, before ultimately writing a short-response that was supported by the text evidence they designed their ship around. Virtually all students demonstrated growth on RI.5.1 by the time of the next RALLY practice test that was administered following the activity.
NEXT STEPS:
• I will continue to use the Passport to Social Studies curriculum to develop new ideas on how to engage students and adapt the lessons from the curriculum with other resources from history museums and historical societies.
• I plan to utilize the skills I gained organizing, leading, and implementing group work to develop larger project-based learning units. I will most likely take ideas from passport and expand them into larger PBL units.