When I am teaching my history standards, I really like to teach the students to look at both sides of a situation.  Rarely is history cut and dry and I want the students to see that, just like the world we live in now, there are a lot of ways to look at a situation.  Last year, I wrote about how I did this with the Boston Massacre , but this year, we started early on this topic when discussing Christopher Columbus and his role in not only US/World history, but in our culture at large.  I asked the students what they knew about Columbus.  Many knew the old tale, "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue."  They knew there was a day dedicated to him and that he was an explorer who discovered America.  One even said he was the first person to ever set foot in America.  So....they didn't know much.  Overall, they did seem to have a pretty positive view of them man (I mean, he has a day named after him so he must be great!) so I wanted to try and c......

Our Explorer unit is in full swing now and things are moving along quite nicely.  After a brief oral retelling by me about how the  world was, for all intents and purposes, two separate entities, since the oceans kept the two major hemispheres apart, we launched into a reading about the various reasons why the early European explorers decided to explore in the first place. Now, each year I do this with the students and, in the past, I had the students create a little flipbook of those reasons (I wrote about it here in this post). This year, I took a little different approach.  We talked about how there are three main categories that historians have classified European desire to explore -- God, Glory, and Gold. I gave the students this article which outlined these three reasons   fairly well. (but be forewarned.  This article came from a homeschooling blog and it a bit religious.  I had to do some cutting and pasting of a few of the paragraphs before I......

In social studies, we are currently studying about early European Exploration of the New World.  To get the students researching and learning about the time period, I thought I would combine our computer lab time with something related to our social studies topic. I wanted something that my students could complete rather quickly (we only had a few sessions left in the computer lab) *and* would allow them to apply the lessons we have been learning about researching, parsing questions, and word processing skills such as changing the font and importing clip art.  When I went on an internet search and came across this fabulous {free} template for an Explorer Trading Card from Ginger Snaps . There are two different templates.  One is a static, prefilled topic one that you can use if you don't have computer access for the students.  The other one, however, is an editable power point that the students can actually type on! Once I found the template, I knew that th......

A little dramatic of a title, huh?  Well, since we are studying early exploration, I thought it fitting.  :) We have moved into our unit on Early European explorers and this time around I thought I would start off a bit general before we moved into specific explorers.  So we did two things to introduce the era that I thought I would share with you. Reasons for Exploring Flipbook We started out by reading an informational article about the various reasons WHY explorers would venture out into the new land.  There were basically 5 reasons:  seeking adventure, the lure of gold, searching for spices, gaining new land, and to spread Christianity.  We found information in our article (though if you read this post a few days ago, you will know that there was little bias to be had in that article!) and in our social studies text.  Then, each of those five reasons became one flap on our flipbook.  The students summarized each section, finding key w......