History Of Me

As a previous elementary student, I remember disliking history so much. All it ever was was just a combination of memorization and reading. After reading chapter four and getting insight on Tina’s project “History of Me,” I was immediately intrigued. I found it disheartening to read at the beginning of the chapter that most of Tina’s students did not consider themselves a part of history. Tina began a project in her classroom that allowed her students to be able to look at their past and connect it to their present lives. I think this is a great example of how history works and what the ultimate meaning of social studies is. Tina was giving the history purpose and I love that idea. I also appreciated how she chose to do her assessment. This week in field, I was struggling to understand how I am going to conduct an assessment about social studies in kindergarten, without having them memorize terms or facts. The way Tina took antidotal records and then also evaluated them based on their narrative gave me an idea of how I can assess my students using authentic assessment instead of traditional assessment. It also helped me understand how to evaluate those assessments and how to look at the results and create mini-lessons from the assessment. I think Tina did an amazing job at allowing students to feel as if their
There were many children who were from different countries, or who were primarily Spanish speaking students. During their social studies lessons, many of these students showed little to no interest about the topics in the textbook. As a teacher, if I can connect history to them and show them they also are apart of history, I feel the students will gain a much better appreciation for history than if they are just at their desk reading from a textbook about a country they aren’t