Columbus Day

Over the summer I took a class on improving the instruction of history.  One of the many things I learned was how to engage students in historical "creative" writing.  I tried the "your story" activity with students this past week.  We were finishing up our unit on Native Americans.  I displayed a picture of the Plains People hunting buffalo and asked students to write a short story inspired by the image using at least 10 of 15 displayed vocabulary words.   I was pleasantly surprised with the student work.  Students who are not normally excited about history wrote some of the most creative work.   They were able to bring the history they learned alive in a novel manner.  I was able to assess how well students had learned specific vocabulary and definitely will use the "your story" activity again.