"Reflecting on How Do We Engage Students in Examining History?"

This week, we read Chapter 11, "How can I Involve All Students in Meaningful Social Studies?" The chapter gave different tips and insights on ways teachers can use different methods in order to teach Social Studies. The main idea of the chapter was how teachers will make their lessons engaging for their students, so it captures their attention and is fun to learn. The chapter reflected on how to teach social studies towards the certain standards for different grade levels. Teachers are given great ideas on different types of resources to use in order to teach social studies to students so it is engaging and meaningful. 

Whenever reading a chapter in textbook, it is good to reflect on what you just read. The textbook, "Social Studies For The Elementary and Middle Grades", provides "time for reflection" questions. In class, we chose numbers for our homework assignment. My number was #17. The instruction for #17 was to answer the time for reflection questions on page 343, question #6.

The question was.. "Why do you think the developer did not include grammar as criteria for the rubrics?"

My answer is...
           Whenever we are studying Social Studies, we must keep in mind the different languages and texts that we are reading. In some research and reading, you will come across a word that looks differently than how we would spell it today. Sometimes, these historical contexts are written in old english, greek, or any other languages. Some authors do not always translate the word and leave it in its original text. For this lesson plan, the main idea was for students to reflect and observe paintings and drawings from artists. I think the author of the rubric was more concerned that the students were able to comment, identify, and explain what they have just observed and learned. This is more focused on art work, so generally the students would not be looking at anything that has text on it. Therefore, the students would not have a guide to look at to spell/copy the words they see. The author of the rubric was more interested in the students' thinking and reflection on what they saw more than being focused on grammar. If the author wanted, after a final product was made, they could make a new rubric and add grammar into it after the main ideas were presented from the student(s).