Category Archives: Social Studies

Motivating the Kids

I got a lesson today in motivating my students. It’s Flag Day here in Canada, and that means our red and white flag turns 46. In an assembly on Friday I got a chance to mention this and urge people … Continue reading

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I was Canadian – Part 4

Our interviews with famous dead Canadians are pretty much wrapped up now. I learned a few things in the process. If you’re going to alter people’s voices to make girls sound like guys and guys sound like girls, subtle changes … Continue reading

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I was Canadian – Part 3

This week our project has been focussed on keeping the momentum. I’ve been pushing the kids to develop a bibliography for their project (so I can see that they have adequate sources) and to start using citations in their work. … Continue reading

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I was Canadian – Part 2

Our I was Canadian project continued this week with the kids picking topics, and me showing them the software we are going to use to record the interviews. We’re using a nice open source piece of software called Audacity and, … Continue reading

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I was Canadian

We’re about a week and a half into the school year, so I thought it was time to start with our annual project, I was Canadian. For this I have my Grade 9 students research a late, great Canadian, write … Continue reading

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Playing with Diigo

I signed up with Diigo.com last year. Diigo is a social bookmarking site, very similar to Delicious. Both sites allow you to take the bookmarks that you would normally create in Explorer or Firefox and easily post them on a … Continue reading

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So what did I learn?

I recently had my students create and record some songs on the Prime Ministers of Canada. It was an interesting experience from which I learned at least as much as the kids did, though about different things. They learned a … Continue reading

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Singing a song

I’ve been busy the last few weeks and haven’t blogged much at all, much to my embarassment, but I’ve still been up to interesting things in class. I’ve spent much of the past few hours on this prep day trying … Continue reading

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Playing with Pictures to Show the Past

Over the last few months, I’ve been exposed to a lot of people who, in one way or another, are using photos in their classroom. When I see other folks doing something cool, I start to wonder if I could … Continue reading

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A comic strip biography

I”m a Social Studies teacher by trade with a Masters degree in Canadian history. That makes me someone who’s always looking for a new or different way to get people (and especially kids) interested in the history of their country. … Continue reading

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