Be a Historical Ninja

According to Wikipedia, "the functions of the ninja included espionage, sabotage, infiltration, assassination, and open combat in certain situations."

                                                               

According to us, "the functions of the historical ninja include searching for information, sorting evidence, sourcing documents, informational summaries, and argumentative writing in certain situations.

Where did this idea come from?

There have been a lot of changes in all of our curricula no matter what subject you teach.  Our role as teachers has changed.  There are so many ideas floating around that it can be very overwhelming.  Last year I began experimenting with many new ideas and methods.  It was great but I felt as though I was lacking basic structure for what I was attempting to do.  As a social studies teacher, I was planning all these "Historical Thinking" lessons but it seemed so disorganized and scattered. 

I felt as though my students required a two week orientation at the beginning of the course to explain and experience the goals I had for them.  Therefore, I built the "Be a Historical Ninja" website to serve as a framework for some of the skills we would be mastering throughout the year.

I guess what I am trying to say to all teachers is that there have been so many changes in all departments. Common Core and other initiatives have made it essential to give students in any subject an orientation period at the the beginning of the year.  This will help them understand that the course is more than just memorization of knowledge.  They will learn skills that can help them in any walk of life.

Be a Historical Ninja

Getting to know this site.

As stated above, this site deals with types of text, sourcing, searching, and historical writing.  To begin, students complete a simple activity that introduces different types of text all displaying information about one subject.  Second, there are four different exercises that include sourcing, contextualization, close reading, and corroboration.  Next, students are exposed to different tools for searching in Google and a searching activity is embedded, that was created by Google, to practice use of those tools.  Finally there are writing tasks and examples for students to repeatedly refer back to as they write throughout the entire year. 

This site was intended to be used for orientation but is also a tool that students can refer back to at anytime.  It took my classes about two weeks to run through everything especially since there was a lot of reflection and discussion throughout this process.

Feel free to use or adapt any parts of this site to meet the needs of your learners.  Feel free to contact us with any questions or suggestions.

The idea behind this site can be adapted to any subject area.  You simply need to decide what your goals for the students will be and introduce them at the beginning of the year with small activities like those I created.