Classroom Spotlight
Witness Tree
By: Allison Sumerel
By: Allison Sumerel
The activity that we did during Module 4, where we first read
the Smithsonian article about Witness trees and then wrote our own stories, really stood out to me. I couldn’t wait to go back and try it with my
own class. Our 5th grade
Social Studies curriculum is super interesting spanning from Reconstruction to
today. My students and I love reading,
learning, writing, and doing projects on things that pertain to history.
I decided to bring this activity back to my students. I made a flip chart explaining the assignment
and attached the article to read bits and pieces with the students as well. I didn’t put a time period restraint on
them. They could pretend they were a Witness
Tree in any time that they chose.
My students immediately went to brainstorming. They were looking up all kinds of events in
history in which I hadn’t even thought of.
We had just recently talked about the Battle of Brooklyn (a battle
during the Revolutionary War). One
student shared about being a tree during that time, and included so many facts
from that time period. I also had
students choose times in the Bible. The
students blew me away with their information.
I was happy to see that my students were just as excited as I was about
this assignment. I felt like this was just
enough of a prompt to get them thinking and researching, but not hinder them
from creatively writing.
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| Our school raised $15,000 a few years back to dig a well in South Sudan. |
It was great seeing the student examples of the work your kids did with this activity. When we did this activity ourselves, I found it was difficult to pull on my own knowledge and had to do research. It's great your kids were able to think about what you've been covering in class to complete this activity. It makes me miss having a class when I see teachers getting to try things out as they learn them.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing this! I've been saving this activity in my "back pocket" because I want to get to a certain point before I present it to my kids. I'm glad to see another classroom already being so successful with it. It really gives you insight into what most interested them too. So fun!
ReplyDeleteAllison,
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad you had the opportunity to do the witness tree activity in your classroom. Thanks for sharing the students' writings. It is so fascinating to see what they are interested in writing about and the knowledge that they have about that time period. I hope this is something I might be able to do in my Kindergarten classroom, but I will just have to adapt it a little to fit their needs. I hope you will be able to do this again with your students and see what else they can do with it! Thanks for sharing.
Allison,
ReplyDeleteI am thankful that you found the "Witness Tree" activity enjoyable and compelling yourself as a learner and wanted to provide the opportunity to your students. This writing activity does for me as a writer what reading historical fiction does for me as a reader...it gives me the opportunity to step back in history and imagine what it was like to live through it and to be there as it was happening. I enjoyed reading your application of this strategy with your fifth grade students and also appreciate you sharing their student samples. They were evidence that this strategy not only promotes research but provides opportunities for students to apply both content and their imagination.
Sincerely,
Dawn