Teaching History with Mrs. Byars

This summer I was excited to have as my next door neighbor our district History and Edtech TOSA, Luis Carillo. I had worked with Luis on history curriculum council, putting together a history-social science framework training, and had attended a number of his training sessions on EdTech. Our district has been going through a lot of upgrades and installing more infrastructure to give access to technology in all classrooms (not just those CTE or computer courses.) I have been extremely lucky to have had the chance to pilot devices before most which have led to fundamental shifts in the way I teach so I was extra excited to share those ideas with my neighbor. Maybe too excited... Arrived to this posted on my door...When the #nuggets keep coming! @erhs @CNUSD is better because of awesome educators like @mrsbyarshistory pic.twitter.com/ERRb3qYwTu — Luis Carrillo (@lcccarrillo) June 13, 2018 So I left him a bingo card and everything on it I had done at some point d...

I love our history department and I love how committed my colleagues are to creating engaging lessons for our students. Recently, I've been working with my department on how best to approach the three massive documents California Social Science teachers are supposed to incorporate in their classrooms.  This slide deck reviews how I approach the new California Framework and the existing California State Standards.  What I have found most useful are these planning sheets ( Grade 8 , Grade 10 ) I use when working through what I've used in the past and comparing it to what the Framework asks teachers to now focus on.  I plan to create another deck with resources on how to mix the framework, content standards, and the CCSS Literacy Standards but for now feel free to check out this deck ! It works kind of like a Hyperdoc so feel free to click the links and engage in the activities.

Today I want to share a lesson I made based on this Vox Article . I think maps in the history classroom are incredibly important tools for helping students understand the world. They can tell stories in unique and engaging ways and far too often map work if simply coloring, labeling, and memorizing. What I love about that Vox list, is that the maps tell stories that are much more rich and engaging than "here is where things are." I decided to make an introduction to World War II where students explore some of the maps from that article prior to diving into any of our World War II content. I took 14 of the maps from that article and created a Google Slides deck from them. I will either have students explore the maps on their devices using this link ( http://bit.do/WWIImaps ) or print the maps and do a gallery walk. I created this worksheet to go along with it and plan to host a discussion with the class, reviewing their answers to the reflective questions when t...

Over the past few weeks my World History students have been hard at work on research projects in class class, it was a project I had designed with concepts like Genius Hour and 20% Time in mind but I also knew that I was too far behind in the year to allow my students to just study anything they wanted as both those concepts promote. So I took the things I love about Genius Hour and I applied them to a content specific research project:  Students would reflect daily on their work.  Students would have choice on what they researched (as long as it fell into the realm of World War II). Students would work on this only in class and would get ample time devoted to this task alone.  Students would have total choice in the final product they created from their research. Even knowing that I was limiting their area of study to anything World War II was daunting, part of me worried there wasn't enough buy in, that students would not be able to find something they...

When I started this year a colleague of mine was obsessed with #BreakoutEdu and she kept building these incredibly intricate lessons and showing pictures of students highly engaged in their work. During first semester, I had dipped my toe in the water by making a scavenger hunt that had some locked google forms that students had to open to get the next clue but they were mostly review questions and did not have the same elements of a true breakout.  I knew I wanted to do something big to bring up morale and energy when students returned from Spring Break and I also wanted a lesson that was a mix of review and new information, to get students back into World War II after a week away. So I created by first Breakout lesson and it was amazing.  What is BreakoutEdu? Well, it's kind of like an escape room for your classroom but instead of having students locked in a room and trying to break out of it, they are trying to break into a series of bags and boxes that each h...