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I wrote the following blog post in March, 2006. Enjoy! Introducing American History to children isn’t always easy. I employ the “take two steps forward, one step back” method. I constantly review. I constantly connect old content to new content. Over the last several days we have become knee deep into the American Revolution. During our review of taxes, taxes, and more taxes we were making a list of the different ways colonists protested the taxes. As they volunteered I wrote-----boycotts, smuggled goods, letters to Parliament, petitions, and violence. A young man volunteers, “The Sons of Liberty.” Immediately a girl speaks up and says, “Daughters,too----the Daughters of Liberty!” I make separate entries on the board to please the masses. I say, “I think we have them all. What about important people who spoke out about the taxes?” Students rattle off the following names---James Otis, Mercy Otis Warren, and Patrick Henry. “There’s one more that we’ve talked about, so far,” I prompt. A ...

The following post first appeared here at History Is Elementary on January 28, 2006. It involves a lesson where I used a series of questions to help students discover new material…..linking old knowledge to new ideas. Read on…..YOU might learn something interesting about history and what goes on in your child’s classroom. Remember….this is the season of the mulligan here at History Is Elementary (see my explanation post HERE ). I’m re-posting some past efforts for your enjoyment while I’m off working on other projects. Questioning students of any age is a great way to assess and gauge your success, but I like to use questions to guide students to discover information on their own---information that I want and plan for them to discover. Discovery is an important tool in the classroom. I can provide text pages, notes, and lecture to them all day. They might be able to regurgitate information back at me, but has transfer of knowledge really occurred? Discovery, on the other hand, gives a ...

It is golf season around my house these days. I’m finding golf tees in the washing machine, golf clubs dumped by the front door and assorted golf gloves thrown into my back seat. No….Tiger Woods hasn’t been hiding out at my house, and Mr. ElementaryHistoryTeacher has been far too busy at work to be on the golf course himself. Me? Heavens, no! I’m not the golfer of the family. The golfer at my house these days is Dear Daughter. This is her second season as a member of her high school’s golf team, and if our weather would warm up and dry out she might actually have a good season. I’d hate for her to have to ask for a mulligan for the entire season. A mulligan? Oh, that’s a golf term – it means to do something over – a second chance to perform a certain move or action. A mulligan is not normally part of official play, but it is an acceptable practice among friends. You and I……we’re friends, aren’t we? I hope so because I need my dear readers to grant me a mulligan of sorts. You see for th...

When I was a little girl my mother always shopped for the week’s groceries at the same location – the Kroger grocery store located in the Jamestown Shopping Center in College Park, Georgia. Mother was a slow and methodical shopper and inevitably she’d see someone she knew and would stand in the middle of the aisle talking for what seemed to me to be forever. The topics didn’t interest me at the time…..who was sick, who was well, who had divorced, the next impending PTA project, a church social….blah, blah, blah. I hated those trips….I was always attempting to find something to occupy my time. I would mosey over to the front corner of store where the plywood magazine rack was located. Someone had painted it Columbia blue so it was easy on the eyes, and the bottom area of the shelf was deep enough for a young kid like me to actually sit on a stack of magazines and lean against the side of the rack perusing issues of Archie comics, Disney Digest, and later on a few issues of Tiger Beat, S...

It’s true that I have used this blog in the past to wish happy birthday to my children or my husband…..I’ve used this blog to mention my anniversary…..my mother’s death…..and a few other milestones in my personal life, but I’ve never really discussed my children and their academic life. That’s really not my purpose here. However, recently Dear Daughter brought home an assignment she received from her literature teacher, and it caught my attention. The smidgen of literature teacher that really IS hidden away somewhere in the darkest places of my being instantly noticed a great assignment, and it was just icing on the cake that Dear Daughter received a score of 100 with the words Superb and Wow written across the paper in red. The assignment she had been given also had real worth to discuss here since it involved race relations and how we use our own experiences and our daily situations to pass judgment on the strangers we encounter. Dear Daughter’s assignment involved the poem On the Su...