my day in history...

This is a social studies project that I created last year.  As with many concepts/ideas in content areas, curriculums seem to overlap from grade to grade...causing students to do many of the same projects throughout grade school.  Prime example the timeline.  My first two years teaching social studies I had students create a personal timeline of events that happened in their life, using pictures and graphics to display their events.  I thought they turned out great..so fun to see pictures of the students in events that impacted their life, until year 2 when I walked down the hallway and saw the same project next to the third grade doors.  Because timelines were in their curriculum as well and personal timelines seemed like a great project for them.  Knowing that I would be getting those students in two years I decided I needed to change up the project.  Timelines and chronology are a big part of the first unit in social studies so I didn't want to give up a project to extend the learning....and then this idea hit me. I had be in charge of producing the students news while I was the gifted support teacher and would give a day in history fact for each newscast, so I took this idea and correlated it to the chronological order study.  

Students research their birthday on the sites history.com and on-this-day.com.  I have them select four events which happened on their birthday that interest them to further research (to provide a detailed description of the event) and find a picture for that event.  As a model I created one myself and found it so interesting.  Students have to put the events in chronological order and they add their birthday as the fifth event, with a picture of them as a baby.  Still get the personal connection, still working with chronology, and now includes research skills and summarization skills.  Although, I do not always get the quality I expect, it lets me know that I need to do a little more on my part with a new rubric and some kind of graphic organizer to ensure my expectations are achieved.  This year I put their "Day's in History" in chronological order, which was neat to see who was the oldest to youngest in the class. (also helped with remembering birthdays!) 

                   

(A few examples of the more creative projects)