Diving into a New Adoption…The Start of a Journey

        Diving into a New Adoption

Photo by Vlad Bagacian on Unsplash

Here I am a month into my 9th year of teaching 6th grade, and I’m still learning new things every day. This year my ‘learn something new’ is the district’s new History-Social Studies (HSS) adoption- MyWorld. Full disclosure, I didn’t love everything about the McGraw Hill adoption, but it was familiar. I had learned what to use from the textbook and what needed to be supplemented with outside resources. The previous adoption was old but it was familiar. However, I did discover that I wasn’t growing as an educator by using the same old lessons. 

“The journey is never-ending. There's always gonna be growth, improvement, adversity; you just gotta take it all in and do what's right, continue to grow, continue to live in the moment.” Antonio Brown

In May of 2018, an email came out about signing up for the new HSS adoption training. I noticed right away the first training date was on the last day of our summer
break. Quickly, I decided that I would be enjoying my last days without an alarm clock
and would sign up for a later date. Flash forward to the middle of July when I finally
decided I should retrieve my work bag from the back of my closet and get to planning.
And then the panic set it. I didn’t have any idea of where to start with social studies.
So even though I was enjoying my life without an alarm clock, I knew I’d feel better
if I had an idea of what the new book had in store for my students and me, and I signed
up for the first training.

The training was informative, but I noticed right away that this adoption was SO
different than the previous adoption. First and foremost, this adoption offered videos
to show to students at the beginning of most lessons as a way to build prior knowledge
and vocabulary before reading. I was excited about these videos, to say the least. My
second observation was that this textbook was much more complex and rigorous. Of
course this is positive thing because my students need to be able to read at this academic
level, but I was worried about time. Another interesting observation I made, were the
Quests in each topic (chapter). These Quests can act as performance tasks/investigations
that my students can conduct while we \read and learn together! So now the question is,
how will I implement all of this in the time allotted for social studies instruction?

“I'm not saying it's going to be easy; I'm saying it's going to be worth it.”
― B. Dave Walters

Here are three steps to diving into the new adoption:

1) Take some time to look through the student's Active Journal practice book. Surprisingly,

the Active Journal has some excellent vocabulary building practice, and each lesson has a
reading strategy focus.

2) Log into Pearson Easy Bridge (the MyWorld Inactive website which can be found on
the teacher page of the district Symbaloo) and look over the Topic you're studying with your
students. If you're worried about the complexity of the length of the lesson, try printing out
the lesson summaries. These summaries could even be a pre-reading assignment that you assign
your students beforehand.

3) Try the Quest projects! The Quests would be a good idea for students to practice for the
performance task ina meaningful, engaging way. *Note: The Pearson's trainer mentioned
that some teachers only assign the Quest for some topics.

Diving in with you,

Jenni Merry