At McAuliffe School in Cupertino, I created fictional Pioneer Family identities to help the students prepare for a three night Pioneer field trip. During the field trip, the students would live in character, based on the individual and family identities they chose based on this lesson. They would ask the town council (parent volunteers) for land grants and build their homesteads, including livestock, food, and all provisions as a Pioneer family. My objective was to help them identify traits that would help their families be successful.
See the Pioneer Family Introductions link below to meet the fictional families I created. See the Pioneer Family Lesson Plan and Pioneer Family Rubric for the complete lesson plan, including assessment criteria.
To review social studies content, I led the students through a three part lesson called Social Studies Jeopardy! The author's message sometimes does not make it into the reader's sphere of knowldege because the vocabulary is unfamiliar. So I taught a vocabulary/comprehension technique called Power Thinking. Power Thinking leads the student to outline the material as main ideas, subtopics, and details.
Next, the students generated social studies content Answers & Questions (A&Q, remember they had to phrase their answers in the form of a question).
Finally, they played the Jeopardy game. I made the gameboard on the whiteboard, with the A&Qs written on sticky notes in the quadrants.
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