Long time no see...

Jacqui Duvall
Jan 8, 2018
4 min read

Hello everyone! I apologize for the huge gap in my blogging. This summer I had quite a bit of free time. Other than volleyball camps and practices each week, I was really focused on teaching. Even though it was my third year teaching, school started and I felt so overwhelmed. It felt like any free time I had was spent relaxing for the first time in days or even weeks. Okay...now that I've made excuses for doing exactly what I promised myself I wouldn't do (give up on blogging for more than a month), I am going to give you a brief update on a few goals and to-do-list items for this year.

New Social Studies Standards

A few *cough* *cough*, I mean several months ago, I wrote a blog about how I was going to attack the new state standards for social studies. Luckily, my school has been really great about getting all the social studies teachers to trainings through the AEA and I feel pretty comfortable where we're at right now. We are currently in the first-year of the five-year process for incorporating the standards into current practice. According to our AEA, we are in the early stages and shouldn't even be unpacking until the second year. This is great for alleviating some of my initial stress, but it also begs the question...."What do I do right now if I can't unpack the standards yet?"

Therefore, I have come up with a few ways to fill my Personal PD time through categorizing what I currently teach into the standards that I "think" I understand. This has been somewhat helpful in determining what I can keep and what I can throw away, but also makes me wonder if I am interpreting these standards correctly. I have continued to use the word document and PDF that I included in my previous blog post. The document lists the standards, has a date column for when I cover it and has an another column for notes about how the lesson went. This has been a lifesaver for me because I can keep all of my ideas in one place and it is convenient and easy to update on my computer.

If you want to see what I have so far or have any suggestions for how you are working through the standards, please comment below or send me a message here.

Updates and Ideas for 2nd Semester

As I have mentioned before, this is my third year teaching and I have taught the same core class each year. This gives me the opportunity to try out new ideas each year and also to change things to better fit each year's students. My first year teaching, I ended up leaving out an entire continent worth of material because I simply ran out of time. I decided before the end of that school year that I had to change the way I taught the material, so that I could fit in more content. Last year, I did this by teaching basic skills of geography during each continent, instead of doing basic skills as separate units. This gave me more time to cover each continent and students applied the skills they learned to content we talked about in real time.

This year, I have been hoping to incorporate more fun lessons throughout each unit to engage students in the content. I have already done an Ellis Island Immigration day, made immigrant journals and dyed them with tea, and simulated an airplane flight to Rio, Brazil. The rest of the year will be spent going through each continent and talking about a little bit of history to emphasize current-day issues in those regions. This is my way of starting to incorporate more of what the state is looking for in 7th grade social studies, even though we're technically not supposed to be incorporating for a few more years. I figure, I will need a few years to tweak and make mistakes with the new standards, anyway, so I might as well get started making those mistakes now! :) Within discussions of modern issues, I would also like to include lessons on other cultures, diffusion, religion, language, and just general everyday life for people living around the world. I hope to do this in some fun, interactive ways.

My goal is to incorporate the following ideas into each unit second semester:

Food Days
Eating food from the countries/regions we talk about
For example: Chicken Tandoori or Fried Plantains
Game Days
Play games that originate from the countries/regions we discuss
Simulations
Simulate daily life and historical events
(I already do a few of these, but would like to incorporate at least one into each unit)
Virtual Tours
Google has a way to do virtual tours of building and cities around the world. I would like to figure out how this works, but am not sure where to start.

Lastly, I started a fashion instagram for teachers. I will upload daily pictures of my outfits and I hope to include some casual Friday and weekend outfits, too. I love choosing my clothes each week and mixing and matching the pieces I have to make new outfits. If you are in need of some help 'style-wise' or just like seeing fashion blogs for teachers, please follow me on instagram @blushandbookbags.