K-8 Social Studies Resources

I've had a great term teaching Social Studies Methods to pre-service teachers at Brandon University. One of my goals as a university instructor is to engage my students in assignments that are useful and relevant to their future teaching practices. This year, one of our assignments was to create a collaborative collection of K-8 social studies teaching resources. My students sourced a ton of great resources, and I'm excited to share the document with you here. 

The Museum Hack

 In January 2018, I enrolled in Advanced Research Methodologies at University of Victoria with professor Dr. Kathy Sanford. Kathy is a feminist and post-structural researcher in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction as well as the graduate advisor there. I learned a lot from Kathy, and perhaps one of the most interesting things she shared with us was her work in museums. Together with colleagues Dr. Darlene Clover and Dr. Nancy Taber, they developed the feminist museum hack--a pedagogical and methodological approach that encourages museum visitors to examine exhibits through a critical feminist lens. This disruptive practice challenges the museum as an authority on history and promotes the inclusion of different perspectives, diverse groups, and seldom-heard narratives. Museum hacking can also act as a form of resistance against gender oppression and injustice. Kathy took our class to the Royal BC Museum where we had the fascinating experience of "hacking" the exhibits. 

This experience stayed with me, and when I found myself teaching Social Studies Methods at Brandon University in 2020 and 2021, I wanted to expose my students to this pedagogical approach. With Daly House Museum only a short walk away, it seemed like the perfect learning experience to accomplish a number of outcomes: i) demonstrate the role of museums in the teaching of social studies; ii) strengthen my students' understanding of experiential learning approaches; iii) develop their ability to examine museum exhibits and curatorial statements; and iv) give them the knowledge and experience to hack museums with their future students as part of social studies teaching. 

To build knowledge of the approach, we connected with Dr. Sanford and asked if she would be willing to talk to our class via video call. To prepare for the call, we read one of Dr. Sanford's articles on curatorial statements (available here on p. 190) and listened to a podcast interview with Dr. Clover. I also pulled out some resources from Silvia Tolisano (2011) on how to turn a Skype call into a learning call. As it often is when teaching pre-service teachers, my purpose was two-fold. I wanted to demonstrate for them how to maximize the learning surrounding a video call so they could do this with their own students AND I wanted to make this a rich learning experience for them. We began by searching Dr. Sanford online and used Google Maps to see where she was located. We confirmed the time zone and season there. Using a shared Google Doc as a planning tool, my students assumed a variety of roles: greeting Kathy, providing a territorial acknowledgement, asking questions (added to the Google Doc before and during the call), sharing our learning via Twitter, and thanking Kathy. 

Samantha shared a Treaty 2 territorial acknowledgement. 

Cassandra welcomed Dr. Sanford to Brandon University and our class. 

Dr. Sanford shared a presentation with us for about 25 minutes, and then the students asked her many, many questions about her work and the museum hack approach. It was a fascinating 45 minutes of learning and sharing. 

Dr. Kathy Sanford presented on her work with museums and the museum hack approach. 

Take a look at some of my students' takeaways here.

Our next task was to decide how we would approach hacking the Daly House Museum. Kathy had shared a variety of ideas, such as leaving sticky-note suggestions and questions on exhibits, re-writing curatorial statements, and redesigning exhibits to make them more inclusive and representative. First of all, we wanted to look at all the exhibits and match them to Manitoba curricular outcomes for K-8 social studies. For the actual museum hack, my students came up with their own approach based on the book snaps we had created earlier in the course. They decided to photograph exhibits, then use text-over-image tools to annotate the pictures with their questions, criticisms, and suggestions to improve the exhibits. The images were then shared via Twitter using the hashtags #ssmethods and #museumhack. Take a look at the students' visit to the museum here.

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A post shared by Leah Obach + Devon Caldwell (@kgeducation.ca)

And check out my students' museum hacks:

This was a powerful learning experience and my students' feedback was very positive. We loved getting out of the classroom (which seems to happen rarely during COVID) and we really enjoyed examining the exhibits with a critical, contemporary lens. It made for a more engaging and relevant museum visit that had true purpose. Are you interested in trying the museum hack with your students? You can apply this strategy to in-person or virtual museum visits as well as online exhibits. Learn more here:

• listen to a podcast interview with Darlene Clover on the museum hack (also available on Apple Podcasts)
• read the Feminist Adult Educators' Guide to Aesthetic, Creative, and Disruptive Strategies in Museums and Community (edited by Clover, Dzulkifli, Gelderman, & Sanford, 2020)

Access online exhibits and virtual tours here:

• Google Arts and Culture
• 8 Virtual Tours of Canadian Museums 

9 Online Teaching Strategies and Tools...and a Kindergarten Diva Update!

Hey everyone! So it's been a hot minute since I added a new blog post to Kindergarten Diva...and although my husband and family will tell you that I'll always be a diva, I'm no longer a kindergarten one 😢 I concluded my kindergarten classroom practice last June when I made the decision to move to a resource/inclusive learning support position. Why? Well, a few factors informed my decision:

• I have a Master of Education degree in Special/Inclusive Education, and when I lived in Victoria, I worked nearly exclusively in special education. I absolutely loved it. 
• the pandemic wasn't going anywhere, and I had no desire to EVER teach kindergarten online again. And, I was really concerned about how the pandemic would impact my pedagogical approaches to in-person teaching. 
• there was a very small number of K students coming in, which meant that it would be a K/1 multi-age class. Since I'm only 0.50, that meant a job/class share situation--zero interest in that! 
• I knew that I'd be collecting data for my PhD dissertation research for the 2020-21 school year. A resource position just seemed like a better fit with the busy-ness of data collection. And it really has been.

So how has my school year gone so far? Well, I think I made the best possible decision moving to resource. Although I miss teaching kindergarten (and project-based learning, and the students, and all the fun) SO much, I knew myself well enough to know that pandemic teaching and job sharing was not for me. My principal has allowed me to work full alternate days, so some weeks are Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and other weeks are only Tuesday and Thursday (my absolute favourite of course)! The rest of my time is filled with:

• data collection (I'm currently conducting a mixed-methods multiple-case study in one rural and one urban school division). More info coming soon--this definitely requires its own post. 
• teaching online at Brandon University in the Faculty of Education. In January, I taught an Evaluation and Assessment course, and now I'm teaching Teacher Identity in PENT (Program for the Education of Northern Teachers) at Brandon University.
• working with my teacher best friend Leah Obach at KG Education. Although our in-person learning retreats are on hiatus, we're having lots of fun blending wellness and professional learning through different online offerings. We have our online signature course, Cultivating Connection, a podcast by the same name (just search Cultivating Connection on Spotify or Apple podcasts), a wellness challenge, and we're currently launching another session of our online book club. 
• I'm the secretary of ManACE (not a super busy position of course)
• acting as the teacher professional development chair in Fort La Bosse School Division. My main activities are hosting/organizing our monthly podcast, Teach like a Bosse, designing monthly Potty PD posters for school staff bathrooms, and facilitating an online professional learning book club for FLBSD teachers. We just read Wab Kinew's book, The Reason You Walk, and it was so good!
• teaching yoga online from my home yoga studio. Online yoga has gone really well, and after a year of this, I've definitely got the technology figured out (this probably deserves its own post too). Find out what I'm offering with yoga here. 

Moving forward, what can you expect from this blog and a Kindergarten Diva who is no longer teaching kindergarten? I'll continue to share about my teaching and learning activities as well as my PhD research. My interests haven't changed--I'm still passionate about project-based learning, play-based learning, technology integration, and wellness. With that in mind, here's my favourite NINE online teaching and learning tools and strategies. I shared them on ManACE's Instagram account this week, and thought that teachers in this audience might benefit from this information too. 

9 Tools and Strategies for Teaching and Learning Online 

Waterfall questions: students type their response to a question into group chat but don't hit send until the instructor gives the signal. Questions cascade into the chat window all at once. Great for formative assessment, activating prior knowledge, and building community.

Would you rather: students are presented with two choices (can be just for fun or related to course content). Students share their response aloud or in the chat--excellent for building community, formative assessment, and activating prior knowledge. I'd also recommend applying this activity to numeracy--there's a wonderful site called Would You Rather Math that has so many great activities ready to go and free to use!

Socrative: free online quiz platform with multiple choice, true/false, short answer, and entrance/exit slips. This formative assessment tool is web and app-based and suitable for kids in Grade 4 and up. Find out more here.

GooseChase: create a virtual or in-person scavenger hunt using this free app. I use it to give students an overview of websites, curricular documents, or policies. Challenges include taking pictures, answering questions, and creating videos. Teams compete against each other in real time and it's lots of fun!

Seesaw: online learning platform that's perfect for sharing materials, submitting assignments, and creating a portfolio. Seesaw worked well for me in kindergarten and I love using it with pre-service teachers too. Listen to a podcast interview with a Seesaw ambassador here.

Calendly: students/families can schedule meetings with you online and a video conference link is auto-generated and emailed out. It integrates with Google calendar and many other tools. This year, I used it to schedule online parent-teacher interviews for our entire school as well as for booking podcast interviews, one-on-one meetings with students to begin a new university course, and online office hours.

Padlet: an online bulletin board that works well for discussion questions and collaborative brainstorming/sharing. It's web and app-based, although I greatly prefer the web-based interface.

Four Corners: four different activities in four different breakout rooms--basically digital centres! Students stay with their group and collaboratively complete each activity.

Jigsaw: using PDF annotation (Lumin), I split articles into four sections. Students begin in a "home" breakout room, choose what section they'll read, then I move them to their expert groups where they read and discuss the same section. Students return to their home breakout room to teach their group members about their section.

These are some of my favourite strategies and tools that I've used in my role as an online university instructor at Brandon University. Of course there are many more--what are your go-to tools and strategies? Comment on this blog post or connect with me on social media--I'd love to hear from you!

Instagram @devoncaldwellyoga or @kgeducation, Twitter @india0309.