Entry Eight: Black Ants and Buddhists (Chapter 6)

     Chapter 6 of Black Ants and Buddhists focused on how to teach young students the importance of voting. The approach to teaching students about voting can sometimes be very standard, boring, and predictable. As classroom teachers, we need to ensure that students, even the youngest ones, are able to make the connection between the importance of voting and the impact the vote from the masses can have in the nation, state, city, and their immediate community. It is also important for the students to get to this high level of critical thinking and connection making by engaging them in a real-world hands-on experience. The teacher from the article decided that the best approach for her students was to learn about how voting came about and who was allowed to vote to begin with, as well as how minorities, who were once excluded from voting, gained their right to vote via hard work, dedication, peaceful protest, and so forth.
     By creating an immersive lesson in social studies you can ensure that students will be involved, making connections, as well as establishing their sense of identity and self as a member of society. By sparking the students' interests and leading them on a mission to register people to vote allowed the students to get a glimpse of the importance that this right has to offer them and the rest of the nation. Taking a dull lesson and making it age-appropriate, hands-on, collaborative (with peers, parents, teacher, and other professionals) allows for a more realistic foundation to be laid on which the students will continue to build their respective political views upon.

Entry Seven: Walking and Talking Geography

Community drawing from Social Development By Jessica Martinez

     When thinking about the best way to teach students about location, whether it's relative or absolute, it is always in the best interest of the students to start within their immediate surroundings. This is a geographical concept that is not hard to teach to students because as children develop they are able to make connections to what is around their immediate area (ie: house, neighborhood, school, and so forth) by simply recognizing the landmarks around a particular point of interest or by recognizing business logos like those of McDonald's, Chick-fil-A , or any fast-food restaurant that a child might be familiar with. 

     When I talk about starting small with the students, students as young as pre-kindergarten, I mean talk to them about their school environment and what's around it. Take the students on a walking field trip of their school and draw a classroom/school map, which the help of the students, to anchor the concept of relative location, then have them draw their own map. The activity can be simplistic in nature before moving on to a more broad concept like that of the community. These types of activities will engage students' prior knowledge and allow them to discuss with their peers and teacher their understanding of the relative location.

     Engaging students as early as pre-kindergarten allows for future and further development as well as comprehension regarding relative and absolute location in consequent years. This is the initiation of vertical alignment amongst the TEKS that need to be covered in every grade level and also the initiation to life long learning and the ability to pinpoint area location on any type of map.