List, Group, Label
This strategy, from Teaching Social Studies to ELLs by Tina Beene (p.18), works wonders as a review at the end of a unit or across multiple units.
- List: After the end of a unit, give students 8–20 VNG visuals from that unit. These should be visuals that students have already had conversations about throughout the school year, so they already have some familiarity with them.
- Group: Have the students work in teams to make groups with the visuals, with each group containing at least 2 visuals.
- Label. Instruct teams to come up with a label for each group. For example, a group containing the words March on Washington, Little Rock Crisis, and assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. might have the title “Important Civil Rights Events.”
- Once completed, allow teams to compare their groups and labels with other teams.
Have Students Find New Visuals
This strategy is simple and promotes deep, critical thinking. Have students find a few images on the Internet, or draw a few images, to represent a visual. Once finished, have students share the images in partners or groups with sentence stems like:
- This image represents ___________ because…
- This image is an example of ___________.
- This image made me think about ____________ because…