OJCS Middle School Social Scientists

In our OJCS Middle School Social Studies classes, we have shifted to focusing on the KEY skills that students need to develop as Social Scientists. It’s easy in some subject disciplines to create your won ‘tunnel vision’ on the topics that you need to teach in a school year- and Social Studies is one of those disciplines. Why? The Ontario Social Studies curriculum provides an outline of the Geography and History topics to focus on for teachers in any give school year, such as the reasons for and against Canadian Confederation. With the time contraints felt by teachers in any education system, it can be quite easy to focus on the WHAT.

While the WHAT of our classes is important, we’re focusing on the WHY and HOW for a richer and more meaningful classroom experience. WHY is a particular topic important to learn about? HOW can I best investigate a particular topic as a Social Scientists?

Today in our combined French and English Grade 7 Social Studies, we focused on one of the key skills: formulating inquiry questions for our upcoming unit on ‘Water’. We learned that a rich inquiry question cannot simply be answered with one word, is a yes/no question, and should be directly linked to a detail in the source. The specific source we focused on was photographs. Below you can see some of the different photographs we analyzed and the students discussing the quality of each inquiry question created.

Curious for the other key skills our Middle School Social Scientists are learning? Stay tuned to our blog!

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