Elizabeth Spasiano - Teacher Testimonial

Speaker: Elizabeth Spasiano, 3rd Grade Teacher, NJ

Elizabeth Spasiano: The reasons that I love using Social Studies Weekly as the teacher are really threefold. Number one, very easy. The teacher's guide lays everything out for you. It shows you where you can concentrate on vocabulary, the overreaching theme, comprehension questions, higher-level thinking, and also through the teacher's guide, you have access to lots of resources that you can print out and use either whole class or small group. The other reason that I love Social Studies Weekly is materials. Each student has their own magazine, we can revisit the magazine, it goes along with the online component that has lots of embedded videos to provide background knowledge and extension questions and ideas that relate back to the theme. The standards are hit. So when you go through the units you don't have to worry about, as a teacher, am I hitting the standards I need to teach? They are aligned. The other thing that I love about the units are you can pull from any area of the units and incorporate it into other areas of the curriculum. So, one example is in science we were learning about the climates of the United States and climates around the globe. So I went into Social Studies Weekly and I pulled out the lessons on regions of the United States. Then this way the children could explore it from two different avenues. Then we moved on to regions around the globe, climates around the globe. So it helped to make this a real-world skill, a real-world activity, and then they could help their parents plan on where they might want to take a vacation. We also talked about where you might want to live because where you live influences how you live. So the kids were really into that project that we came up with. And it was just again, very easy to use, very engaging. The kids enjoyed it. They love playing the game after reading an article online or in the magazine. I can pull up the online component and we can either work with this game as a whole class to earn coins or we can work with teams. And what's nice about this is like if you see the program on TV, where if you don't know the answer, you could phone a friend. I have the kids in classroom, they can ask a friend. So everybody's engaged and we give the thumbs up, thumbs down. If we agree with an answer in the middle, if we don't know, then we can go back online, reread the article, revisit the question, and help use some test taking strategies as well in going through the components. So I've been teaching for about 30 years. This is my fourth year using Social Studies Weekly. I love the program. It's very easy to use. Very engaging. The kids enjoy it. And I would encourage anyone who is interested to give it a try.