Using CCSS Social Studies to promote Social Emotional Learning

Incorporating Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in the classroom will support the development of the whole child and is key to increase student academic growth.Here I present a history lesson that  support student SEL within classroom routines are incorporating strategies into lesson plans. 

The goal of this lesson is --- to further your  ability to  introduce SEL skills across the school community and classroom. Over the years we used a SEL Curriculum. Once a week we taught our students  a SEL lesson. After watching SEL  videos, upon reflection I remembered that my students , except for a few, rarely internalized what I was teaching them in relation to SEL. I believe they failed to apply what they had learned because they saw the SEL class , as just another required course like math/ social studies.

As a result,I believe that by incorporating social emotional skills (SES) across the school community students will seamlessly acquire the empathy to enhance their interactions with their peers and adults. That is why I hope this lesson will provide you the skills to help facilitate my students’ expression  of SES during their everyday interactions with peers and adults.

I believe that making connections are a major part of teaching. I will admit that over the years I was unable to bond with every class I taught but for the better part of my teaching career I bonded with most of the students in my classes .

I have taught many grade levels since I began teaching. My first assignments were at High Schools, teaching Social Studies. Since most of my students couldn’t read well and be prepared for class I took a Reading course. This led to a Master’s degree in Special Education.

I loved teaching 6^th Grade.  So,  when I was asked by my former principal to teach Special Education I was not too interested. Yet, I taught special education because she said she needed me to do so.

Teaching Resource in Middle School proved to be a joy. I have learned that making connections is the most important thing you can do if you want your students to learn. This results, from the fact that my students start the year off at a disadvantage. They are already 2-3 grade levels behind the rest of their peers in the General Education classroom, so, they are immediately made aware of their deficits and the fact that they are academically behind. As a result, I see firsthand , that “Every child deserves a champion, that adult who will never give up on them”.

In the Gen Ed classroom I have to be that champion. I have to move around the class trying to interpret the General Ed lesson for my students ( and often some of the Gen Ed students), so they can understand what their teachers want them to learn and the tasks they need to perform. I have found that they learn best when you show them encouragement.

Over the years, I discovered , that the best way to make a connection is to provide students opportunities to be successful learners. They become successful learners when they perform a task demonstrating what they know related to what they are learning.

I have found that providing them verbal praise when they successfully accomplish a task, and or give them a ‘Fist Bump’, makes them feel connected to the greater learning community and not feel as if they are a step child.  This makes  students feel they are somebody and strengthens their connections to you as their teacher and the classroom learning community which recognizes that my students, although behind academically can  produce knowledge just like other students in the class. Teaching Special Education  has helped me to understand the power of  human connections.

Medieval Trade Routes and the relations between Peoples along them

by Clyde Winters

Teacher Name: Clyde Winters

Lesson: Medieval Trade Routes and the relations between Peoples along them

Content Area: Standard(s) Addressed: List the content specific standards addressed.	CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.6-8.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including vocabulary specific to domains related to history/social studies. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.6-8.5 Describe how a text presents information (e.g., sequentially, comparatively, causally).
SEL Standard(s) integrated/Addressed:	Goal 1- Develop self awareness and self management skills to achieve school and life success.
	Goal 2- Use social awareness and interpersonal skills to establish and maintain positive relationships.
	Goal 3- Demonstrate decision-making skills and responsible behaviors in personal, school, and community contexts.
Learning Target(s): (What will student(s) know and be able to do because of lesson?)	Students will  Use textual evidence to respond to written and oral questions relating to the text. Understand that you use social awareness , decision-making  and interpersonal skills to establish and maintain positive relationships. Trace the medieval trade routes of Europe and Asia;  identify important commodities traded during the Middle Ages; and describe some of the cultures and peoples that traded along this route, and some of the uses of commodities in the Middle Ages.
Materials/Texts Needed:	Pencils and rulers  Colored markers or crayons Large white construction paper (at least one sheet per student)   Encyclopedias, geography textbooks, and other library resources Computer with Internet access (optional) Handout Trade and Fictional Accounts of peoples Appendix A
Technology/website used:	Trade Routes between Europe and Asia during Antiquity, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/trade/hd_trade.htm Travel, trade and exploration in the Middle Ages, https://www.bl.uk/medieval-literature/articles/travel-trade-and-exploration-in-the-middle-ages#
Instructional Outline:	Formative Assessment Criteria for Success:  Students will write an essay and make a map. Activities/Tasks: Copy Appendix A and distribute to students Tell students to read Appendix A (15 minutes) After reading the Appendix , Begin the lesson by introducing the concept of trade. Ask students: What is trade? When did civilizations begin trading? What kinds of goods are traded today and why? Once students have shown that they understand the concept, discuss trade in the Middle Ages. Ask students: How was trade in the Middle Ages different from trade today? What kinds of goods were traded in the Middle Ages? Ask students what is culture?  Record students’ definitions of culture. After discussing the students’ definition explain to the students that Culture is “ the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group”. Ask students “do people in Europe and Asia practice the same culture? Record student responses and discuss them. Explain to the students that people in different countries,  practice different cultures. Ask them “If you are from a different culture if you want to trade with people practicing a different culture should you respect their culture? Discuss this question. Say “In Appendix A we read about the fictional accounts Europeans wrote about Asians, the authors of these text never knew. How might these stories influence people who had never met the Asians involved in the  trade.” Ask students “Can you successfully trade with people who are proud of their culture, if you treat them with disrespect ?  Ask the students to take out a sheet of paper and write an essay answering this question “Why would respecting your trading partners a good way to promote trade between people practicing different cultures? Student will share their finished essays with the rest of the class. Collect essays to be graded Day Two Ask students How did people travel between countries to conduct trade? Tell students that they will be making a map of Europe and Asia, identifying medieval trade routes on these continents. Each map should trace at least three different routes and must identify the cities at the ends of each route and the goods traded between these cities. Talk about ways to identify these goods (writing the names of the goods on the map or using symbols and a Resource located at: www.discoveryeducation.com/teachers/free-lesson-plans/from-medieval-times-to-today.cfm Middle School Sample Lesson TLC Elementary School Lesson Plan DiscoverySchool.com 2 key). Have students draw their maps on a large piece of white construction paper. Suggest that each trade route be traced in a different color for easy identification. Allow students to identify additional cities and commodities along the routes. In addition to geography and history texts, students may use the following Web sites to research their maps:  http://history.smsu.edu/jchuchiak/HST%20101--Lecture%2024Maps_of_medieval_trade_routes.htm  http://www1.enloe.wake.k12.nc.us/enloe/CandC/showme/trading.html #trade http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/society/str ucture/routes.jpg  http://sumy.net.ua/History/map/6!.php   http://www.ucalgary.ca/HIST/tutor/imagemid/hanseaticSmall.gif   http://www.blackstudies.ucsb.edu/antillians/trade2.html  http://www.cc.colorado.edu/Dept/HY/Ashley/hy105/Map_- _Medieval_Trade_Routes_and_Regional_Products.JPG   http://www.cc.colorado.edu/Dept/HY/Ashley/HY104/images/MapKeys/ eruasiatrademap.jpg  http://www.enloe.wake.k12.nc.us/enloe/CandC/showme/commodity.html Student will share the finished maps with the rest of the class. Talk about the commodities traded in medieval times and their uses. Discuss the different trade routes and which might be more difficult to travel. Discuss the ways trade changed the culture of medieval societies, including negative aspects, such as disease, that spread easily along routes of trade. E Definition: Middle Ages Definition: The historical period of time between the fall of the Roman empire in A.D. 476 and the start of the Renaissance in 1453 Context: If you had lived a thousand years ago, you would have experienced life in the Middle Ages.  Silk Road Definition: A medieval trade route connecting China with the Middle East and the Roman empire Context: China had been one of the most advanced empires in the world for centuries, in part because the Silk Road linked it to other countries.  Trade Definition: The business of buying, selling, or bartering commodities Context: In trade, they took beads and porcelain from as far away as China. Academic Standards The National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) has developed national standards to provide guidelines for teaching social studies. To become a member of the NCSS, or to view the standards online, go to http://www.socialstudies.org This lesson plan addresses the following standards:  Culture , Production, Distribution, Consumption and Global Connections . The National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE) provides 18 national geography standards that the geographically informed person knows and understands. To view the standards online, go to www.ncge.org Closure— Evaluation Use the following three-point rubric to evaluate students’ work during this lesson.  3 points: Students actively participated in class discussions; were able to use resource materials without teacher guidance; and created unique and well researched trade maps that correctly identified at least three trade routes in three different colors as well as the commodities traded along these routes. Student essays include information cited from the textual materials.  2 points: Students somewhat participated in class discussions; used resource materials with limited teacher guidance; and created maps that correctly identified two trade routes in two different colors as well as the commodities traded along these routes. Student essays include information only from the discussion.  1 point: Students did not participate in class discussions; were unable to use resource materials without teacher guidance; and created disorganized maps that identified one or no trade routes and only a few of the commodities traded in Europe and Asia. Students failed to write a coherent essay.
Social Emotional Standard details	Goal 1- Analyze how personal qualities influence choices and success. This was a major goal addressed in the lesson. This question: “Can you successfully trade with people who are proud of their culture, if you treat them with disrespect?” , will be  used to stress to my students that their personal behavior does influence how they will get along with their peers.
	Goal 2- Analyze ways to establish positive relations with others. It is important that students interact positively in the classroom. To address this goal identify approaches to resolving conflicts constructively, I will ask the question “If you are from a different culture if you want to trade with people practicing a different culture should you respect their culture?” This should encourage a lively discussion. Hopefully the discussion will allow students to see the importance of respecting their peers in maintaining positive relations.
	Goal 3-. Evaluate how honesty, respect, fairness and compassion enable one to take the needs of others into account when making decision. I met this goal by asking the question:  “Can you successfully trade with people who are proud of their culture, if you treat them with disrespect?” My students from the way this question is formed should identify the fact disrespecting another person or group will and can cause a conflict, if they decide not to cover their mouth. This question should also make it clear to my students they will have to make positive choices when interacting with classmates, while recognizing their own role in making decisions that keep their peers safe from illness.

Appendix A

Trade Routes between Europe and Asia during Antiquity

Long-distance trade played a major role in the cultural, religious, and artistic exchanges that took place between the major centers of civilization in Europe and Asia during antiquity. Some of these trade routes had been in use for centuries, but by the beginning of the first century A.D., merchants, diplomats, and travelers could (in theory) cross the ancient world from Britain and Spain in the west to China and Japan in the east. The trade routes served principally to transfer raw materials, foodstuffs, and luxury goods from areas with surpluses to others where they were in short supply. Some areas had a monopoly on certain materials or goods. China, for example, supplied West Asia and the Mediterranean world with silk, while spices were obtained principally from South Asia. These goods were transported over vast distances— either by pack animals overland or by seagoing ships—along the Silk and Spice Routes, which were the main arteries of contact between the various ancient empires of the Old World. Another important trade route, known as the Incense Route, was controlled by the Arabs, who brought frankincense and myrrh by camel caravan from South Arabia.

Cities along these trade routes grew rich providing services to merchants and acting as international marketplaces. Some, like Palmyra and Petra on the fringes of the Syrian Desert, flourished mainly as centers of trade supplying merchant caravans and policing the trade routes. They also became cultural and artistic centers, where peoples of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds could meet and intermingle.

The trade routes were the communications highways of the ancient world. New inventions, religious beliefs, artistic styles, languages, and social customs, as well as goods and raw materials, were transmitted by people moving from one place to another to conduct business. These connections are reflected, for example, in the sculptural styles of Gandhara (modern-day Pakistan and northern India) and Gaul (modern-day France), both influenced by the Hellenistic styles popularized by the Romans.

See:  https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/trade/hd_trade.htm

The role of fiction and The Marvels of the East

Among the non-European lands known to medieval people, India was probably the most important. Europeans got most of their knowledge about the Indies from the remnants of Greek learning, which had eroded over the centuries since the end of the classical period but survived in some Latin works. The earthly paradise was reputed to exist in or near India, at the farthest eastern edge of the world. Stories about Alexander the Great were particularly popular, having been handed down from the classical period. Alexander, the leader of the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedonia in the 4th century, famously travelled all the way to India in his pursuit of power and lands. Many manuscripts describe his battles and adventures with fabulous creatures.

Latin sources gave medieval writers and map-makers a variety of options to draw upon when describing regions of the world. This array of sources, which did not always agree with each other, meant that new medieval writings blended easily into an already-varied culture. Writers such as the 3rd-century Julius Solinus, who drew on the works of Pliny the Elder, encouraged the idea that Asia and Africa were very hot places full of monsters and strange people: people without noses, or with giant feet to shade them from the sun, or with dogs’ heads, for example. The Old English The Marvels of the East is one such text that draws on these ideas, as well as those found in a hotchpotch of other Latin sources. Preserved in three manuscripts, including the book that contains Beowulf, this text describes and illustrates a vast range of strange and magical people and animals. Here you will find dragons, phoenixes and other familiar legendary creatures. But it also features people who are described as having ‘black’ skin, alongside other wonderful people who sleep curled up in their own enormous ears. Medieval Europeans’ view of people of different ethnicities was often bound up with wonder, fear and fiction.

The Marvels of the East is a fantastical account of the lands beyond Europe. This version appears in the same manuscript that also contains the Anglo-Saxon epic poem, Beowulf.

Medieval travel narratives: Marco Polo’s accounts of Asia and The Book of John Mandeville

While John Mandeville, Marco Polo and Odoric of Pordenone all wrote travel narratives in which they claimed to have seen a number of monstrous peoples, animals and cultural practices first-hand, the authenticity of these claims varied.

Marco Polo did, however, witness a great deal of what he wrote about. In the medieval period, the Polo family were among the greatest European travellers in Asia. Marco journeyed to China as a direct consequence of an earlier stay there by his father Niccolo and uncle Maffeo, who had set out from Constantinople in 1260 on a routine trading venture to Sudak in the Crimea. After this, they accompanied a caravan travelling along the Volga river to Sarai, the capital of Barka Khan, who was the lord of the western Mongols and grandson of Genghis Khan. In 1262, they got stuck in the region because of a war. While biding their time there, they received a request for an interview from the great Kublai Khan, who had never met any Europeans. He tasked them with taking a letter to the Pope to ask for 100 educated Christians to be sent to the court as missionaries. The only two people nominated for the task refused to go, so they took Marco, who was then aged 17, instead. He did not return to Venice until 24 years later.

In his Book of the Marvels of the World, also known as The Travels of Marco Polo, Marco describes many of the marketplaces he travelled through in terms of the strangeness of the business customs he sees, suggesting that they are unreasonable and difficult to understand. He accuses a Brahmin population of superstitions regarding a belief that business decisions could be influenced by the direction from which tarantulas enter a room. In one of the most interesting moments, he expresses delighted bafflement at the use of paper money at the Khan’s court. Marco Polo casts himself as a kind of imaginative bureau de change, a cosmopolitan Venetian embedded in a foreign court by his own choice.

Unlike Marco Polo, the medieval ‘traveller’ John Mandeville is widely believed to have never existed at all. In the enormously popular text The Book of John Mandeville, the writer claims to be an English knight from St Albans. There is no evidence, however, to suggest that he really existed. His ‘book’ contains claims that John Mandeville was a soldier in the army of the great Khan, and that he had travelled far and wide in the East. There, the book relates, he came across all sorts of monstrous creatures and strange people, of the kind we might recognise from The Marvels of the East. This faux travel narrative was so popular that Leonardo da Vinci and Christopher Columbus both consulted copies, and its lack of authenticity, does not seem to have made a difference to the reception of the text. It survives in a staggering 300 manuscripts, and was translated into at least ten languages.

See: https://www.bl.uk/medieval-literature/articles/travel-trade-and-exploration-in-the-middle-ages#