PebbleGo & Plickers for Social Studies: Then & Now

PebbleGo Long Ago & Today Articles

February is a great time to visit our Social Studies standard, Then and Now. Lucky for me, my new favorite website PebbleGo has a terrific section of articles about Then and Now (or Long Ago and Today as they call it)  There is information on everything from clothes to transportation to school and games! For the last few weeks I have let the students independently explore all of the articles during their listen to reading time/computer time.

A few observations of the PebbleGo Long Ago and Today selection: 

• The students are obsessed with the old school telephone video! So much so that I have had to tell them they get to watch it 1 time a day only! 
• The students think it is hilarious to see what different clothes people wore
• I like that it isn't just information from the colonial days. Each section has information from colonial, frontier, 1900s, 1950s, and today. 
  
• As always great vocabulary and I really like how the pictures match the time periods. You'll find drawings, sepia, black & white and color photographs. Many students picked up on this and made connections to the books that we are reading about various time frames. LOVE that learning happening!

To summarize what my students learned I had them do a Now and Then sort that I found on Fantastic First Grade Froggies blog.   My students are big fans of sorting and I like how the images she included correspond to the subjects on PebbleGo. Head over to her blog if you want a copy-she has it for FREE! Thank you!

I was thinking of how I could add a fun technology component to this project to amp up our learning and make us more accountable. I have been speaking with my marvelous Media Specialist, Jenny, about using Plickers. (Plickers is a website/app that has premade cards that each student holds that you can scan with the Plickers app to get a quick answer to a question and see the results immediately) I thought what a great time to try it out and see how it works for Kindergarten! I found a variety of pictures of items from long ago and today and made them into a Google presentation. I did a split screen of the presentation and the online Plickers graph (see picture to the left) The students used their Plickers card to respond if it is an object used long ago or if it is from today. We could watch the graph on the screen to see how everyone was responding. I could also see their responses on the iPad that I was using to scan the cards. By using Plickers I can get immediate feedback on whether they are understanding the concept or not directly to my iPad. Don't you just LOVE using apps as formative assessments tools?! I am super thankful to my Media Specialist Jenny for all of her help! We did a lot of problem solving on the go and I will share my helpful tips about Plickers in an upcoming blog post ASAP! Check out my blog post about tips for using Plickers in K here!