The Work of a Fainting Goat

When I'm home at night with my family, my girls (ages 10 & 5), we like to unwind after dinner watching some funny videos. The go to, first request is always fainting goats. For those of you unfamiliar to these animals, see the video below (be prepared to play on loop and have a good laugh):

There's nothing medically wrong when they fall, it's just when it is time to do something, they fall over. Like my youngest, Sophie says "It's like they're plastic!"

For me this made sense when thinking about wrapping up our most recent Social Studies unit which focused on the inquiry question of "Are Freedoms Free?" To tackle this important question we looked at the Constitution, Bill of Rights and all 27 Amendments. When putting together the summative assessment the goal was clear for kids. Unlike the fainting goat, their work needed to stand on it's own merits.

To accomplish this, the sharing out was round-robin format. Students left their work at the table why circulating to other presentations. They were not allowed to stand and explain what their peers were reading. As we work through the CVSD Transferable skills, we have already done a lot of work around Claim and Evidence. This unit was scored on Reasoning & Analysis. Their ability to look back at all the work we did over the unit and analyze how it supported their claim.

The way in which the work was presented was open-ended. I told students to play to their strengths. I received a lot of different formats. Slideshows, posters- both digital and on paper, some videos, a skit or two and even a poem were all part of the things shared out. I was more than impressed with how these turned out and learning students demonstrated. I've included some examples below.

On a related but separate note- I had a great initial brainstorm meeting on Wednesday with Emily Rinkema to start mapping out next year. My big takeaways was that I will be using the UN Sustainable Development Goals as the spine of my curriculum. My homework for Emily is to create some graphic to represent that as a curriculum map. I'll be building a website to house the work for next year. The idea will be to integrate the C3 National Social Studies Standards with the Global Goals and work down through the district transferable skills and learning targets to be the critical thinking skills needed to address solutions to the goals all while using the lens of history to teach it. One theme I'm considering for the year is "Using the past to solve the present". Let me know what you think of that!

Here are some of the examples. Two are from 5th grade girls and the other from a 6th grade boy:

Poem

Slideshow

Essay