Social learning is vital to a child's education in my opinion. Dr. Orey explains that students are able to build meaning and understanding from others as well as their environment. However, students cannot do this if we do not give them the opportunity to do so. As the teacher, it is extremely important that we are providing opportunities for students to work collaboratively with other students to construct something or even brainstorm ideas or to find a solution to a problem. Social learning gives students the opportunity to socialize and learn from their peers. Not only does this teach them socialization skills but it teaches them how to collaborate with one another and how to respect other peoples ideas and opinions. I like social learning opportunities because I am always amazed by what students can learn from one another.

I never realized that I have been using the jigsaw approach as Dr. Orey explained in the video. For the past two years with my social studies lessons, students work in small groups of 3. Each week the groups remain the same as far as students are concerned. Students are presented with a social studies topic and a newspaper that is focused on our social studies curriculum. Since the newspaper has so much information and would take a tremendous amount of time to completely read, and there is one for every week, students cannot spend the whole week working on reading the whole newspaper to find answers to the worksheet that is provided. Instead, students work together to split the work up equally. Students each take their part, read it and study it, and reports back to the group teaching them the information in their section of the newspaper. Each students learns the material and becomes the teacher. Once all students have done their part in teaching the rest of their group, they each take the worksheet that accompanies the assignment and they complete it. They have the choice to either do the worksheet or work as a group to make a flyer, poster, or other tool to teach someone about the information they have learned. Students are currently working to create a blog in which they will report to the blog on a weekly basis about what they have learned. I never realized that I was using the jigsaw approach but I know now that is what I have been doing. My students love this opportunity to work together and although it requires them to do a lot of work, they are always very excited when Social Studies time comes around.

My voicethread is as follows and means alot since there is a recent impact of its relevance to not only myself but my school and community as a whole. Watch it and you will see what I am talking about. I hope you enjoy.

VoiceThread 

http://voicethread.com/share/2499038/