Words change their meaning. When I first taught fifth grade, I created this activity for students to look up the meanings of rights, responsibilities, and privileges. They would brainstorm examples and we would discuss what this would look like in our classroom.
I taught other grade levels for several years and returned to fifth grade this year. As I was preparing my beginning of the year activities, I realized that how I thought about privilege in the past had changed.
I have updated this lesson to reflect the idea that privilege isn't always something that is earned. I still call my incentive system "Privileges", but it is with the understanding that privilege has different meanings in different contexts.
To download the new version of Rights, Responsibilities, and Privileges, please visit Artistry of Education @Teachers Pay Teachers.
Update: Click here for a printable graphic organizer to create a character description and background information for a writing activity.
I'm in the process of cleaning out my room to get ready for summer. I snapped a picture of the settlement we created as a part of our social studies unit.
I usually have students research what life was like for settlers in Washington State. I use photographs from the local university and historical society to show students what life was like then. We research different inventions to make sure we have no anachronisms. Next I have them write a journal as though they were living here in that time.
This year, we created the settlement as a class to have a common place and events to include in our stories. The students developed characters to write about. We even had some claim jumpers and land grabs in our settlement. Some students were placing buildings on other people's claims. The land office (me) had to settle disputes.
I have several writing assignments like this one in my Writing Historical Fiction product available in my TPT and TN stores.
Update: February 2017
This year my teaching partner and I had the students display their information on cubes. We used similar questions, but required the addition of a portrait and a map of the explorer's route.
Original post (May 2015)
This school year, I changed how I teach explorers and the culminating assignment for the unit. I created notebooks and the forms shown below. Students read articles and text books and answered the questions in their notebooks.
I taught them about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and Wants and we used that to look at the reasons explorers travelled.
Finally, I used my five paragraph essay forms -- available here -- to write about what they had learned. The introduction and conclusion paragraphs were about how explorers generally met needs and wants. The three detail paragraphs were about specific explorers.
This was a successful fourth grade research project.
I took this picture a couple of summers ago at the British Museum in London. While we were there I observed school groups having their end of term trips. I have to say I was a little jealous of the opportunities these schools have with all of the amazing museums to visit.
A little closer to home, my teammate has rented two trunks from the Museum of History and Industry (in Seattle) to share this year. My students have had the chance to observe and handle artifacts from local Native American tribes and explorers without leaving our classroom.
I looked for some Artifact Analysis forms that my students could use to make detailed observations and inferences. I combined some of the questions I found and made the boxes large enough for fourth grade handwriting.
Here is a Google Doc version of my Artifact Analysis form. This could be used for trunks that you borrow or to study at an actual museum.
