5 Social Studies Activity Ideas for the 1st Week of School

Kirsten 0:07

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the social studies teacher podcast. Today's pretty exciting, because this is the first couple of episodes where we are actually launching or are going live on a Monday rather than a Tuesday. Since I am no longer continuing with my podcast for TPT sellers, I'm able to shift around things and move up this podcast to Monday. So you can check on Mondays for new weekly episodes of the social studies teacher podcast, I'm really excited about the new changes. I honestly love getting new podcasts in my earbuds at the beginning of the week in general. But for some reason Monday's are my favorite.

Kirsten 1:36

Since it is the beginning of July, I know it is kind of getting back to that time not quite for some people depending on where you are in the country. But it is kind of getting close to that time where we're wanting to think about what to do for the least the first couple weeks of school. And that's exactly what today and next week's episodes are about. I'm giving you five Social Studies activities for the first week of school this week. And next week, we'll talk about the second week of school, I wanted to spread it out. Because of course, this is summer break, I want you guys to enjoy it, I didn't want to overload you with a ton of information. In this episode, and next week's episode, I'm going to be explaining the five different activity ideas in depth. I think these are really, really, really great ideas. A couple of them, actually quite a few of them I've done before, in some way, shape or form with my students, maybe not at the beginning of the year. But at some point when we were talking about that specific topic. So what I also wanted to do was try to make sure that the activities related to community building, since you're getting to know your students, probably not necessarily diving right into social studies curriculum. So these social study activity ideas are really great icebreaker activities, just ways to get to know your students ways for your students to get to know you. And just building a positive classroom community in your homeroom or in your classroom in general for social studies, or whatever subject or subjects you teach. And also kind of dipping their feet into what is likely taught at the beginning of the year, which is geography. And a lot of these activities can be kind of tweaked to match whatever you're teaching, or whatever you're going to be teaching throughout the entirety of the year. So maybe like you can take one of these activities and gear it towards Texas history or your state history or US history or geography maps, world maps or something like that. So there's a lot of flexibility with these activity ideas. So hopefully you enjoy.

Kirsten 3:50

Let's start with the first activity idea for you. The first one is a community bingo. Create bingo cards with different characteristics or experiences. So maybe one bingo card says has a pet, has traveled to another country, went to Florida, whatever it might be just random experiences or characteristics. The students are going around the room mingling around and finding classmates who fit each characteristic and they write their name in the corresponding squares. This can be done where they can get five in a row, or what you've probably heard of before, as this is kind of like a very common community building activity, you might want them to fill in maybe a blackout or as many as they can in a certain amount of time. This game in general promotes interaction and help students learn about each other without going into depth. It's just really superficial stuff and they can build connections through that. So that is the first activity idea for you.

Kirsten 4:59

The second idea is called mapping my summer. Have your students draw a map of their summer vacation activities. They can include places they've visited, activities they did, and any significant events. After they map out their summer, in various locations that they might have been, they can share with a partner or a small group or as an entire class. This map can be as wide or as small as you want to make it. So like think large scale map, small scale map, because maybe some of your students, they may not have traveled outside of their city, they may not have traveled outside, you know, maybe they traveled outside to another country or to another state. So everybody's maps might look a little bit different. And you can always give them just kind of, they can free draw the map of their community, or you can give them a piece of paper with maybe an outline of your state, or, you know, the United States or country or world if you want give them different options to go off of just to kind of give them that. And additionally, you can just give them some ideas. It doesn't have to be anywhere super extravagant, or anything like that. It could just be we went to the neighborhood pool, we went to a friend's house, we went to get ice cream, whatever that might be just they're thinking about any memorable places, or activities they did over the summer.

Kirsten 6:33

The third Social Studies activity idea is called geotag icebreaker. Give each student a sticky note and ask them to write down one interesting fact about themselves related to Geography. Now doesn't have to be from this past summer, it can be literally any time in their lives. So it can be a place that they visited or a favorite landmark of theirs, whether or not they visited that landmark, then have them stick their notes on a world map or a US map or even a state map, if you want depending on what you're going to be teaching in the social studies class you have and you can have them stick those sticky notes on the map and share their facts with the class as they place their geotags. This activity is a really simple way to encourage sharing and help students find common interests. This activity could really take maybe, maybe not even that long, like not even 30 minutes, but you can stretch it out so that it does give the you know, give the opportunity for students to share their facts and then for students to ask follow up questions, just kind of more just getting to know them. This can take up a really good nice class period. Or you can shorten it if you want to, and just make it super quick.

Kirsten 7:53

The fourth activity idea is a classroom timeline. Create a collaborative timeline of significant events in students lives. Each student can contribute two to three events by adding important dates or milestones to the timeline, such as their birthday or a memorable trip taken. This activity helps students learn about each other's backgrounds, introduces the concept of timelines in general, and also encourages a sense of belonging in their classroom community. So the timeline can be created on butcher paper, just get a big roll out, draw a simple timeline, blank timeline. And I encourage you to also participate in this and other activities as well, I should probably have mentioned that before. But think of for yourself, think of two or three events added to the timeline, you can even show them as an example. And it could help to maybe divide it up into decades, or maybe every five years or every year if you want to do that. So you can kind of spread it out depending on the age of your students. And additionally, just giving them the chance to share just a little bit about their dates and milestones and making sure that they're put in the right order. You can have them do this, where they put the year, as specific as they want year, month, date, if you want them to do that, or you can just have them do the year and month, I think it might be best to just try to get it as specific as possible. So you want to encourage students to like really know or try to figure out what that day might have been like, for example, their birthday, that would be an easy one to know specifically. And then they can illustrate a picture or find a picture of themselves if they want to bring it from home. And they can add it to that index card and add it to the timeline. And you can keep that timeline. However, you know, I feel like this would make a great bulletin board just to have up for the entirety of the year. All right. So I would say for this classroom timeline activity, maybe you can give them the prompt, the, you know, at the end of class and maybe their homework or what they can do the following days, like, make sure they talk with their family members, and talk with, you know, trying to figure out two or three important events, finding out the dates, month, date, and year and then come, they can just write it down on paper, then they can put it on index cards, or even decorate it with pictures that they bring from home and add it to that timeline. So that's a, you know, just an idea of how you can incorporate the classroom time line, if it's not something they probably would be able to get specific on if they need assistance from home.

And the fifth idea I have for you for today is called a classroom constitution. This is a really great way to discuss rules, and just how you want your class and how you want to think about as far as what the rules are going to be. I know many leader and me schools do something like this, where they're setting up their own classroom, constitution or set of rules. And it's a really great way to get students on board of how they can contribute and what they need to put in what they need to put into, make sure that teacher can do what they need to do and what students need to do. I did this with my fifth graders, it was a really great easy activity, I had a big post it note board. And we talked about what we should put on our classroom constitution. And all the students signed the classroom constitution, just as the agreement and we refer to the classroom constitution throughout the year. So what you're basically doing is guiding students in brainstorming and drafting a set of classroom rules, making sure you're discussing the importance of rules and maintaining that order. In fairness, this is a great way to foster a sense of community and responsibility. So a lot of the rules would usually revolve around, respecting others, respecting your teacher, don't talk out of turn, raising your hand. So those are just some ideas. And I wouldn't do like you know, 15 ideas, you can keep it pretty broad, I would say like the five main rules, maybe four or five really good rules that can fit into a lot of different scenarios.

So to recap, the five social study activity ideas for the first week of school, we've got community bingo, mapping my summer, geo tag icebreaker, classroom timeline, and classroom constitution. If you're wondering where you might be able to find all five of these activities, with all the prompts, and without you having to come up with any prompts or characteristics or anything like that, the good news is that by the time this podcast is live, there is going to be a resource in my store for purchase that has to do with this particular series that I'm going with. So you'll be able to see a back to school social studies pack with all 10 of the activities that I mentioned on this podcast. So if you're interested in snagging that one less thing off your plate 10 activities that you can mix and match put wherever you want or follow the scope as is, then I highly recommend that you pick that up. So that is something that I'm going to leave in the show notes so you can go and check out more information about it. Alright, thanks again for tuning into this episode. I will see you next Monday. Bye.