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Hi Rachel Hornbarger and thanks for your question! There are lots of ways to prepare to teach Big History for sixth graders. Here's a list of helpful materials:
You can find the Big History Course Guide, Big History Course Outline, standards alignment, and other helpful docs at the bottom of the course homepage: https://www.oerproject.com/Big-History-Project?share=link, just click on the Teaching Tools hammer to get you there.For information about different topics covered by our courses, go to the Topics link at the top of our site. This is where you'll find the Middle School Writing page, which is where the writing placement table lives, and there's also a Middle School Geography page with a geography placement table that's aligned to National Geography Standards. The Topics page is also where you'll find pages on other historical thinking skills and content topics.By clicking on the Teaching Tools hammer on the unit page, you'll find the Big History Unit Guides, Unit Vocab, and other helpful items.By clicking on the Teaching Tools hammer on the lesson page, you'll find the Lesson Guide, which has all the information you'll need to teach that lesson including the driving question, pacing, vocabulary, instructional supports, and sample answers.The "For Teachers" tab at the top of the website has a lot of teacher resources including a link to the PD Events page, Teaching Guides for all courses, our Blog page, and Help/Support, which is where the guides for Google integration and LMS cartridges live.For multiple-choice exercises, check out our Khan Academy page: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/oer-project-big-historyI'm also going to tag one of our middle school educators who is well versed in teaching middle school Big History: Meaghan Mihalic . Meaghan can you help out Rachel and also tag any other middle school Big History teachers you might know. Thanks! -
Bridgette OConnor thanks for the mention! Greetings to you Rachel Hornbarger ! You have received some tools that will help you get started in the right direction. Something that is helpful for me is to preview a unit's content to see which activities and resources stand out as engaging for my students. This has been key because there are definitely more materials than you can get through. Are you new to 6th grade? New to the course? Let's get a dialogue going, and I'd be happy to share some of what has worked fo rme.
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I teach 6th grade ELA and integrate our SS standards as much as I can. My SS standards for 6th grade seem to mostly correlate with units 4 and 5. Is it possible to just use those units, or is it imperative that I start with unit 1? Thank you
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Hi Carly Borchelt You can absolutely use materials from Big History Units 4 and 5 to supplement your ELA lessons. Your students might encounter some vocabulary terms, such as thresholds of increasing complexity, that they may be unfamiliar with if they didn't start earlier in the course, but those can easily be defined/explained.
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Carly Borchelt You can certainly pull from those units that relate. I agree with Bridgette OConnor comments about some of the vocabulary terms, but you can obviously explain those things. I would also recommend looking at the origin stories lesson in Unit One. Those are always a hit with my students. I have them become experts on the stories in partnerships and present them to the class. The class takes notes on each story. To culminate, I have them select two stories and write a compare-and-contrast piece. It's one of the first writing pieces I get from the students, so it's a good way to see how they establish a claim/thesis and defend it with evidence.
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Thank you Meaghan! Did you have them create their own origin stories like the lesson suggests? Just wondering how 6th graders would do with that, or students with unstable home lives.
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Thank you Meaghan! Did you have them create their own origin stories like the lesson suggests? Just wondering how 6th graders would do with that, or students with unstable home lives.
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I did not have them create their own origin stories Carly Borchelt I used the comparison writing as a way to wrap up the experience. What I find so fascinating is that there are so many things that are similar across cultures about our origins!