Time Eras

In social studies I gave my students four eras to choose from. The could choose: The Roaring Twenties, World War 1, Dust Bowl, or World War 2. After they listed their choices in the order that they wanted to learn about, I put them into groups. Each group had high and low readers in it. Each group was then given a book about their era. They were supposed to read the book, list six events that happened during their time period, write a paragraph about two of the events they listed, state their favorite thing they learned about during this time period, and write down something they did during the time period that they wished we still did. When they were done with this they were supposed to make poster depicting what happened during their era and present it to the class. The presentation could only take five minutes, everyone in the group had to take a part, and no one could read their part.
As the students were reading their books it was fun to hear some of their comments. Some of the comments were: Hilter was a dictator, which is one of our vocabulary words.
He was even notorious, another vocabulary word. Roosevelt was the President during the dust bowl, I wonder if that was the same Roosevelt I did my President report on. I enjoyed students relating their current learning with their past learning.
Some groups got right to work and other groups had a hard time getting started, but everyone got the assignment done.
Every group's poster was different. Some groups did a timeline. Other groups drew a variety of pictures that took place during their era. Some had a mixture of words and pictures to describe their time period. All and all I think the groups learn a lot about their time period and learned a little about the other periods. The students used the following stategies: cooperative groups, summarizing, and note taking. It added a little variety to the usual social studies instruction.