Intro to the Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution is my favorite unit to teach! I love everything I do during this unit. Just last year I added this activity as an intro to the Industrial Revolution. I heard about it from another teacher at my school and I was intrigued so I did it last year. My students reacted just as the teacher said they would last year and again this year. It was perfect!

Students come in and I hand them a coloring sheet. I tell them we are going to relax and take a brain break and color for the first 10-15 minutes. The students who know me better are always a little skeptical..."she's tricking us into learning!!!!" haha! However I maintain my innocence and the students eventually relax.

Then I tell them we are going to play a coloring game. I split the students up into groups and assign each student one color. They are in charge of their color only on the color by number sheet. When they are done or when I say switch, they switch with someone in their group. I tell them the group with the most completed coloring sheets in the fastest time gets a piece of candy, but that never happens! :) As they start to color I start out calm and slowly tell them to switch faster and faster. I also "yell" at students to go faster and if they color outside the lines I "fire" them and rip up their coloring sheet! I also add new coloring sheets in as they are frantically trying to color.

Without fail, students absolutely freak out. They are so stressed and have no idea what is going on.

After about five minutes of the second coloring activity I stop and explain life Pre-Industrail Revolution. Most people worked on small farms making everything by hand or from a small shop. Things were really quality, but expensive and took a lot of time. People didn't have much and life wasn't great.

Then I talk about the factory system and how it changed life as we know it! It made things cheaper so people could afford more, created a middle class, etc. but it also had some drawbacks.

Students love this analogy and they love being in on "the secret" of the coloring activity until I can get through all of my classes.  

It's a great ice-breaker for the Industrial Revolution! 

Lewis and Clark Twitter Assignment

Last year, I did a Lewis and Clark newspaper assignment. I thought I liked it and intended to do it again this year, but when I got it out to make copies I didn't think it met the goals of my unit. So I had to scrap it and come up with something FAST. 

I love social media and I haven't utilized it at all this year in any lesson. When I taught World Civ, they created instagram pages for an Egyptian God/Goddess. However since I made the switch to U.S History, I haven't. So the Lewis and Clark Twitter Assignment was born.

I brought elements together from many lessons I found online until I found something that worked for my classroom.  The main aspect of the assignment I got here, from Room115's TPT shop. It was a little expensive for what you get, which I left in the feedback. 

The next thing was to find a Twitter template. I looked high and low and couldn't find anything I liked. This was the closest from Alli Brigg's TPT shop. I ended up downloading it and students edited it on Google Slides. I deleted some parts like "Trends" and "Photos and Videos". We just didn't have time to do that part, but it could be cool to incorporate next year.

Students were able to zoom in and edit right on slides and it was fairly easy, only after I explained what Twitter was. It was pretty surprising how many of my 13 year olds didn't know what Twitter was! 

It ended up being a great project, despite the parent who told me it was an inappropriate assignment... (??) Gotta love feedback!

Here's an example of a student that got full points!

The students loved this project and kept sharing their hashtags and tweets, so there was a ton of laughter! 

Happy tweeting! 

Lewis and Clark Board Game

Hello, friends! Long time no blog! I coach Mock Trial and we are smack dab in the middle of our season, so I have had no life! It's fun and I love our team, but it sure does take over. However, I'm back and ready to share some awesome resources.

I'm compiling a blog post about being paperless in my classroom, let me know if you have questions!

We just wrapped up our Lewis and Clark unit. I was a day ahead of the rest of our history department so I needed an extra activity to slow us down. This board game was perfect! It's a free download from  Relentlessly Fun Deceptively Educational. I can't imagine the work that went into it. The few things I added were a spinner instead of dice, this made the game go a little longer and each student get more info. I also cut out small circles with my Cricut for game pieces. The last change I made was students had to write down a summary of each card in their notebooks. This helped when all students wanted to do was read the last step of each card and not get any historical information. As I say, "THIS IS SCHOOL, PEOPLE!" 

The kids love, love, LOVE when we play board games. We played an awesome one for the French and Indian War that the students still remember. I find it's a good way to wrap up a unit.

Head over to the Deceptively Educational blog to download Westward Bound for your class!

Thanks to my three student aides who cut everything out and laminated all of it! They were champs.