UTES Social Studies

Please vote for my Panel for SXSWEdu in March. My panel is Using Technology to Make History Come Alive.

Please visit our kidblogs! http://kidblog.org/LittleLonghorn5thGrade2012/meledbetter/dear-fifth-graders/ I’ve written a letter to our students and their blogs about school are a hoot! Have a great summer, ml  

A brilliant idea that I found on Pinterest from Math-N-Spire (http://www.mathnspire.net/2011/09/coordinate-graphing-math-lab-centers.html), inspired this Geography They Can’t Get Enough Of activity. In the last few days of school before summer break and moving on to middle school, how do you motivate 5th graders to read maps, find and use latitude and longitude, explore continents, and create their own maps? Take a [...]

Don’t forget that I’m blogging on our new UTES Educator Resources shared blog. Here’s a handy link! http://blogs.utexas.edu/utes_educatorresources/ See you there!

Check out my latest blog on our UTES shared blog site. http://blogs.utexas.edu/utes_educatorresources/ See you there! ml

Okay all you SXSW fans, be sure to catch the following SXSWedu session. I am very flattered to be one of the educators on this panel. The Needle in the AppStack Finding the Best Teacher-Recommended Technology for Your Classroom Description: Educators are being bombarded with resources, technology and new ways to improve student learning and [...]

http://blogs.utexas.edu/utes_educatorresources/ Please visit our new shared UTES blog site for an update on our Bull Run skits. See you there! ml

What do you get when you take:  a great book, a historical event, a fun movie, and smart fifth graders? You get meaningful, moving, living history skits. At least I hope so. In true Little Longhorn style, we will be re-enacting the experiences of fictional characters from Paul Fleischman’s book, Bull Run. We will be [...]

It is especially gratifying to have classroom social studies discussions, simulations, and debates on the same topics being debated by policy-makers. These past 2 weeks we’ve studied who immigrated to America in the 19th and 20th centuries, and why they left their homelands. We’ve read about and seen newsreel of Ellis Island in the early 1900s, and heard [...]

http://blogs.utexas.edu/ddcecentral/2011/04/27/ut-elementary-students-carry-water-for-africa/