I'm so excited to start the new school year! The first few days of in-service has allowed me to really finalize a lot of thoughts about how the Social Studies curriculum will work this year. I'm pleased to roll it out and hope it engages all learners to think deeply about the world around them. I've created a mission statement for the class this year, "The Goal of Sterling Social Studies: Use transferable skills to think deeply about the modern world using the lessons of history to develop solutions for the future."
Our curriculum timeline will start with our school-wide Social Studies unit around Peace One Day. From there we will look at the theme of "Historical Connections" through the lens of the Civil War and Reconstruction. That will bring us to about the end of November. We will then start our integrated Humanities unit with Ms. Peterson to look at Westward Expansion. After the holiday break we will do a quick unit on economics or physical geography before spending February engaged in our team-wide integrated unit "Winter Survival". After February break we will do more geography work looking at human interaction. After the April break we will end our year with a Genius Hour Project around the Sustainable Goals.
Every Monday we will be covering our "Culture & Diversity" theme by looking at current events, a kindness curriculum and connecting with classrooms around the world using "Empatico". I'm very excited for Mondays!
I have created KUD's for most of units. KUD stands for "Know-Understand-Do" which sets out the learning objectives. As a class we will be building the sequence for these units and determining project outcomes together for the first time. Those KUD's can be found on the Social Studies site curriculum map page.
I'm attempting a Universal Design approach for our learning using the book "Innovate Inside the Box" by George Couros and Katie Novak and working at building literature books into our weekly class routine as well. I have lofty goals for my curriculum this year but I'm excited to take the risk and see what happens.
