These TCI staffers were classroom teachers in their former lives and are now dedicated to helping educators bring learning alive
for all students.
Don’t miss out on your opportunity for students to learn more about George Washington and our other Presidents with this fun lesson suitable for elementary or secondary classrooms. Everything you need to build the game along with a lesson is included.
The Visual Discovery strategy is my favorite for a number of reasons. One is that I love the images in all TCI programs. Of course, we have staff members whose job it is to find those wonderful images, so I also love that there are many, many places teachers can go to find their own images and create wonderful presentations. We’ve assembled a list of fabulous website on the attached document:
Updated-Great Places to Find Images
The other reason I like Visual Discovery is that it’s an easy way to begin using the TCI Approach. A Visual Discovery lesson isn’t as risky as an Experiential Exercise yet allows students to discover content under a teacher’s watchful eye. Teachers can step in and complete the story or even impart content knowledge. I think of this strategy as wading in to the TCI pool without diving in to the deep end.
Here are the five steps to keep in mind when doing a Visual Discovery lesson in your classroom:
1) Arrange your classroom- Make sure students can interact and that the image is projected as large as possible.
2) Use a few powerful images-Don’t bombard your students. Instead select a few rich images and focus on them for as long as 20 minutes.
3) Ask questions carefully-Use TCI’s Detective Analogy to guide students through the discovery of information beginning with the most basic (What do you see?).
4) Challenge students to read about the image-You’ll be amazed at how eager they are to read after you’ve piqued their curiosity with an image.
5) Have students interact with the image-Act-it-outs get students out of their seats interacting with the image.
We have a super video of a Visual Discovery lesson in a classroom on our Theories and Strategies page.
How do you use images in your classroom? Where do you find them?
Many social studies teachers ask their students to watch the State of the Union address. It is an important civic function that, unfortunately, many do not exercise. TCI would like to encourage students to become active listeners during President Obama’s speech to the nation on January 24th. To help, teachers can use this activity sheet. Download and print off for your students before this Tuesday.2012 State of the Union Activity
To what extent do the media influence your political views? In this free lesson by @TeachTCI (www.teachtci.com), students work in groups to analyze persuasive techniques and then create and evaluate campaign commercials for presidential candidates. Take advantage of this free lesson, especially during this election year. You can learn more about Government Alive! Power, Politics, and You and try a 30-day trial HERE.Government Alive! Public Opinion and the Media Lesson
MLK Day Lesson on Scribd Download this lesson now by clicking here: MLK Day Lesson
In this free lesson from TCI, students watch/listen to Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and answer questions. In a Social Studies Skill Builder, students are assigned an excerpt from the speech. Pairs work together to find an image to showcase that depicts progress (or lack of) towards that dream. Pairs then travel to see all the excerpts and images created. In a whole class debrief using a human spectrum, students evaluate the total level of progress. Individually, students then create a photo collage which brings to life one of the excerpts.
I wonder how many kids have tried this already? lol
Our CEO and founder, Dr. Bert Bower, has put on his mad scientist (err geographer) hat on to create a wonderful and engaging enrichment activity to extend students undestanding of absolute location. This activity sports rich use of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) as students study and use latitude, longitude, degree confluences, and theme maps to research locations around the world. As an added bonus, teachers and students discover a great website http://confluence.org. You can download the presentation, go full screen from here, or even print out any of the handouts/placards from the presentation by clicking the icons in the lower right-hand corner of the screen (for the Slide Rocket presentation).
On the description of the activity, we encourage teachers to have introduced basic map skills prior to this activity. A great resource for that would be two of our lessons (The Tools of Geography and A Spatial Way of Thinking) from Geography Alive! Regions and People. If you are unfamiliar with this great program that incorporates ALL 18 National Geography Standards from NCGE (National Council for Geographic Education), you can sign up for a trial HERE.
So many teachers struggle to build student writing skills outside of the Language Arts. Teachers in the content area can be uneasy about the time committment away from content as they do writing assignments. It doesn’t have to be that way though. One of my favorite lesson strategies is the Writing for Understanding lesson strategy. In this strategy, teachers deliver a rich content-laden lesson that gives the students lots of pre-writing experiences.
Imagine for example, that you are teaching the concept of spatial inequality in your Geography class using Geography Alive! Regions and People. A rich activity might be having the students pretend to be student journalists “visiting” (through visuals and recorded interviews of people who live there) four neighborhoods in Mexico City. At each stop students analyze the imagery and listen to the people who live there describe life. Students record data and details in a notebook and then write a brief postcard on their stop
Lesson idea taken from Geography Alive! Regions and People, Lesson 9.
before moving to the next neighborhood. At the end of four visits, the students have four postcards, lots of great visuals and auditory experiences (think Marzano’s Nonlinguistic Representation) and also have snippets of authentic writing pieces (postcards). Their final writing piece would be to write an extended argumentative essay that would appear in their school newspaper on the essential question, “Why does spatial inequality exist in urban areas?”
The lesson delivered oodles of content in a hands-on way as well as incorporate best practices when it comes to writing. It’s fun and interesting work for both student AND teacher (that’s undervalued sometimes). If you’d like some other ways that you can infuse good writing in your classes, check out the embedded portion taken from our methods book, Bring Learning Alive on peer read-arounds and writing rubrics.Writing Strategies with TCI
Spirits were high among the social studies brethren gathered in Washington D.C. for this year’s annual National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) conference. TCI was represented throughout the conference with how-to sessions, a pre-conference workshop focused on technology, a group of from Arlington Public Schools middle school students doing TCI lessons, a luncheon demonstration of our new world history program, and a booth overflowing with enthusiasm and long-time friends. TCI staffers even got invited to a private tour of the West Wing.
Did any of you attend the conference? If so, what was your most geeky social studies moment?
The National Archives (@TodaysDocument on Twitter) has a great tool that I’ve become a big fan of. The tool is called Today’s Doc. You can visit the website here or get the app for your Apple or Android device here. Each day, you can view a great primary source document tied to our history. Sometimes they are as simple but profound as the one you see below. Think about the meaning, “This is no drill.” Imagine opening class tomorrow by simply having this image posted on the screen. Challenge your students with a bell-ringer to figure out the significance of the document. Have the students take a few moments to scour their books or web resources to find out more and write down what they think it means on a slip of paper. Collect them and award a bonus point on the next quiz or test if correct. What a great way to have the students look at famous, infamous, and even sometimes quirky primary sources in history.
It's fascinating to step back in time and view these primary sources.
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