Using Journal Prompts in Social Studies

Kirsten 0:09

This is the social studies teacher podcast, a show for busy elementary teachers looking for fun and engaging ways to easily add social studies into their classroom schedule without feeling overwhelmed or pressed for time. I'm curious to know the southern teach an educator and mom who is passionate about all things, social studies, I love sharing ideas and strategies that are low prep and easy to implement. So let's dive in together.

Welcome to another episode of the social studies teacher Podcast. Today, we're gonna get straight into it, we're going to talk about how you can utilize journal prompts and social studies. If I can think back on one of the most memorable activities we always had to do. In writing class ELA class, it was some type of writing prompt in journal prompt, but I actually really enjoyed having a prompt and reading response to it. Even if people weren't reading it, or it wasn't really graded, it was just kind of a nice warm up activity. And so I think this could be of some use in the upper elementary classroom, especially when you're not having a lot of time teaching in certain subjects, such as social studies. So this is just a really great way to kind of invoke discussion and get students talking. So today, we're going to be talking about five steps to using journal prompts in social studies, I'm going to share with you 10 Journal prompt sentence stems or examples that could be used for virtually any social studies topic. And I'll also give you an example, got a lead by example, and give you a walkthrough of the five steps using one of the examples with a real life topic.

So let's talk about what a journal prompt is. Journal prompts or journaling in general, is a super powerful tool for engaging students in social studies. It can foster critical thinking and can deepen their understanding of historical concepts, especially if you're talking about it and reflecting on it as a whole group. By using carefully crafted journal prompts. You can guide your students on a journey of exploration and reflection. So today, we're going to be talking about those five steps and ways to integrate it into your curriculum or your social studies block.

The first step is to select relevant prompts. This is very first thing you want to do is make sure you're choosing journal prompts that are aligning with your curriculum, and students interests. Consider different themes or events or historical figures that you'll be covering or have been covering. And think about prompts that could spark curiosity and critical thinking. Look for prompts that are encouraging students to make personal connections to history and express their thoughts and opinions. I love opinionated journal prompts, I love anything that requires them to make a text to self connection, and a text to text connection maybe what other historical event does this remind you of? And that text to world connection? How can we connect to the world in you know, globally? How could this apply to our life and our community around us?

Step number two, provide clear instructions. Before you introduce to the journal prompts to students, make sure you give them instructions on how to approach journaling. Explain the purpose of journaling and social studies and the expectations for their entries. So if you don't want them to be just writing a one sentence answer or even just like because I thought it was really fun, or, you know, you want them to expand upon it or give them some type of boundary of I want you to try to write at least three to five sentences, a full paragraph, however you want to structure it, just make sure you're giving those clear expectations. Encourage students to be thoughtful, thorough and honest in their reflections. Don't have them write down answers. You know, as we're kind of discussing, I have had some students kind of erase their answers and write down what other people were saying. It's like, no, no, no, you don't need to do that. You can keep your response you can add on to it, maybe but we don't want to just change your answer just because somebody else is saying something different. You can also model sample journal entries to show the type of responses that you're looking for. You can have an example and also have a non example.

Step three is to incorporate prompts into your lessons, integrate prompts into your social studies lessons so that you can enhance engagement and deepen understanding Have the content use prompts as warm up activities at the beginning of class to activate prior knowledge. Or you can use them as exit tickets to reflect on what they've learned. You can incorporate prompts into group discussions, cooperative learning activities, or even independent research projects to further explore different topics. Something that is a major component in my guided curriculum is that I have a let's discuss question and it's purposefully left blank. There's a small little space where after you're taking the guided notes, and you go through the slideshow with the students, you have as a whole group that opportunity to complete a quick right, it's like a very quick journal prompt. It's always related to the topic that they just learned about and took notes on. And it's all left blank so that students have the opportunity to discuss with the teacher as a whole group, and then they can write down their own answers. It's, and of course, with the guided curriculum, I do have suggested answers. But of course, a lot for most, if not all of the journal prompts I have in my guided curriculum. Answers will vary depending on whatever people might respond to. But it's a really great discussion point at the end of the mini lesson.

Step number four is to encourage creativity and expression. Encourage students to express themselves creatively through their journal entries. Encourage them to use descriptive language imagery, personal anecdotes, so those text to self connections to bring their reflections to life. Give them opportunities, if you want to even incorporate drawings, maps photos to enhance their journal entries, celebrate students unique voices and perspectives in their journaling.

And then step number five, you want to also make sure you're creating opportunities for students to reflect and provide feedback. You can always facilitate class discussions after you give them some time to write in their journals or on their in their notebooks and all of that. And you can have them share insights from their journal entries and learn from one another's perspectives. Provide feedback on students journal entries, highlighting strengths, offering suggestions for improvement, encourage students to revisit their previous entries and track their growth over time, depending on what the topic is. I don't remember which teacher did this but I do remember having teachers respond back to my journal entries, like kind of like, Oh, I agree on this point, or, Oh, wow, this is really interesting, you know, just kind of responding back. And so that was kind of a really neat way to say, Oh, my teacher was reading it. And she has like a connection to what I said. So that's really interesting, and could be really beneficial if you want to check their journal prompts. And one thing to point out as far as where to even write these journal prompts, it could be in their current social studies notebook. Something I've also done before is, I've gone to a local copies center, like I think Office Depot, and you can purchase composition notebooks, and I had them cut in half. So they were half sized journal, composition notebooks, bright, neon, colorful notebooks. And it was really cool, because it was like, This is my journal notebook. It's different. You know, it's kind of fun, because it's a smaller version of a regular notebook. And it's just a really great way to have students do some type of journal prompt and quick write. And additionally, it doesn't provide as much pressure for students have to like write long, long, long pages of responses. Because it's a half sheet of notebook paper, like you, if you say like, oh, we only need to do three to five sentences for this journal prompt. This can kind of give them a better feeling of like, okay, I don't have to write that much. It's only three to five sentences. But it also depends on your students and what you prefer. But this is always a really great way to kind of incorporate writing into your social studies blog as well.

All right, let's talk about 10. Journal prompt sentence starters or sentence stems, some ideas just to kind of get your brain thinking about things. So here's the first prompt. Imagine you're living during a historical event or time periods so you can decide whichever one that is. Describe a typical day in your life. What challenges do you face? What do you enjoy? The second prompt idea if you could meet any historical figure from blank, so that's the time period? Who would it be and why? What questions would you ask them? Number three, reflect on a primary source document you studied today? What new information did you learn? How does it help you understand flank? So the historical event better? Number four, put yourself in the shoes of have Blink. So historical figure, write a journal entry expressing their thoughts and feelings during a significant moment in history. Number five, how do you think blank historical event impacted people's lives at the time? How might it still affect us today? Number six, if you were living during blank, historical event, what role would you want to play? Why? Number seven, describe an artifact from blank historical time period that you find intriguing. What did you think it tells us about the people who used it? Number eight, reflect on a recent lesson about blank. So whatever the lesson was, what surprised you the most? What questions do you still have? Number nine, choose a significant event from history and write a fictional newspaper article reporting on it. Include details about the event reactions from people at the time, and its impact. And then last prompt, number 10. Think about a time when you had to stand up for something you believed in, how does your experience compared to the actions of a blank historical figure or group during blank, historical event. So these are just some examples of prompts that are designed to encourage critical thinking, reflection and empathy while also deepening student's understanding of different historical concepts and events, I will make sure to have all 10 of these journal prompts on my blog post. So wherever you're watching this episode, if you just click blog post, Episode 45, you will be able to click on that specific web site page. And you can see all of those, so you don't have to write down these word for word, I probably should have mentioned that the beginning, sorry about that. But you can definitely see all of this on my blog post.

Now let's go through an example, using one of the previous prompts that I mentioned, and we're going to go through it with all of the five steps. So I've decided to kind of think about World War Two, this is something that's usually taught around this time of year. So here is my prompt example. How do you think World War Two impacted people's lives at the time? How might it still affect us today? So let's think of step one selecting relevant prompts. For this example, we've chosen a prompt that asks students to reflect on the impact of World War Two on people's lives, both during the war and also in the present day. So this is a lining with a lot of upper elementary social studies, objectives, just kind of relating to the causes and effects and implications of a variety of historical events. So we're good on if it's relevant. Step two, providing clear instructions. So before I would introduce this prompt to students, I would make sure to provide instructions on how to respond to journal prompts. So hopefully, it's something I've already been doing with them in the past, but it's okay, if it's not, because you can always introduce it as soon as today if you want, but you would make sure to explain that students are considering the ways in which world war two has affected individuals and communities during the war, not just in the United States, or, you know, in maybe Japan, but also people who were Jewish, living in Europe during World War Two. And you can always think about a variety of different groups, if you would like to, depending on who you're focusing on it that certain time, as well as how its legacy continues to influence our world today, what kind of thinking about the effects of World War Two, and how, you know, the United Nations was formed, and how that kind of has led to what we might have today as far as cooperation among a variety of nations. So we would want to make sure that we're emphasizing the importance of thinking, reflecting and thinking thoughtfully and then, you know, having them use what they know about World War Two, and its causes and effects to form their responses. And I would even say, just like making sure that it's three to five sentences, we want complete sentences. We don't want to just write a one sentence answer depending on your students. Going into step three, we can incorporate this prompt at the very beginning, before talking about World War Two, but just for the sake of the content itself. This is probably something I would do towards the end of the lesson as kind of a little exit tickets. So this is kind of just a way like we're talking about the causes and effects of World War Two. And so this is something that they can reflect on individually before sharing their thoughts with a part partner or with a small group or as a whole group. Additionally, maybe you've already talked about World War Two, the following lesson at the very beginning, you can definitely do it as like a warm up like thinking, hey, let's think about what we talked about yesterday or the previous two days, then that's a great way to put it at the beginning of a lesson. But if it's not something they haven't actually learned that I definitely wouldn't put this topic as something that they would do first. Step number four, encouraging creativity and expression. So give them the opportunity to choose to write from the perspective of somebody living during World War Two, such as a soldier or maybe a civilian, or even a child experiencing wartime hardships. Alternatively, students can reflect on how the war has shaped our world today. So thinking about human rights, maybe some technological advancements, and then they could also if you want them to drawings or maps or photographs to enhance their journal prompts. Lastly, we're in step five, give them the opportunity to reflect on the writing and provide feedback to their peers, you can have a class discussion after they write for about five to 10 minutes, and students can share their insights and offer feedback to one another. You can also have constructive feedback on their injuries and highlighting strength, offering suggestions for improvement, or you can kind of do it as like a like, I will read your response. And I'm going to respond back to it in some way. Rather than kind of thinking of it as a you know, like, these are the strengths. These are the ways to grow kind of thing. So it's however you want to do it. But it's great to have students reflect on what they have responded to, and give them some type of insight and feedback to help them with the next journal prompt.

In general journal prompts in upper elementary is a really great way especially in social studies, to deepen their understanding of different social studies concepts, and foster critical thinking skills. So if you follow these five steps that I listed out, you can always create a supportive environment where students feel empowered to write their opinions, reflect, respond and engage with history and social studies in meaningful and constructive ways. Hopefully, this was an informative episode for you and I hope that you can try out journal prompts, if you haven't already. Thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you again next week. Thanks for listening to the social studies teacher podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, hit that subscribe button and leave a review. I would love to hear your thoughts. You can also find me on Instagram at the southern teach. I can't wait for you to join me in the next episode. For more teacher tips and strategies

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