social studies unit complete :)

Erica and I finished up teaching our social studies unit today and it went pretty well. Our topic was kentucky history. The first day, we had the students work in groups of 4-5 for the assessment part. They had a large piece of white paper and they had to draw the state of kentucky. Labeling its capitol, two other cities, state bird, fish and wild animal. The kids seemed to have a good time with this, but they did not seem to work well in groups. There was a lot of arguing and dispute- and this took up thier time quickly. We gave them about 30 min to complete this. The time it took them to actually complete it, and the time we allowed, were way off. They needed almost an hour- just for the group work. Good thing is, our teacher is awesome and she let us have some extra time after recess to let them finish up. This made me wonder if they were not used to doing projects like this in the classroom with our cooperating teacher. Not sure~ They looked great completed, but Erica and I decided that with the group chaos, our next assessment was going to be individual. So, today, we had the kids make up thier own state, making similarities and differences to kentucky. They could call it whatever they wanted, draw it however they wanted, and so on. We gave them a rubric with the blank piece of paper for thier state and this seemed to help. The kids got really creative with this one. Overall, I think they got a lot out of it and they had a great time. SUCCESS!!! :)