The material in this section will assist you with meeting the following objective.
- Determine appropriate learning environments for social sciences lessons.
The concept of learning environments is a complex one, spanning topics like physical design (display areas, seating, traffic patterns, lighting, storage, and organization), themes (e.g., classroom as village), location (indoors, outdoors, off-campus), and intangibles like community, collaboration, inspiration, safety, comfort, and a sense of welcome. Whatever combination of factors come into play in your own classroom, one thing is certain: appropriate environments support and promote student learning.
Environments for Learning
Learn more about how various models of blended learning work in the classroom.
https://www.blendedlearning.org/models/
Read about how one elementary school teacher's way of approaching blended learning changed in response to her students' experience with some of the models discussed in the previous link.
https://www.blendedlearning.org/figuring-out-flexibility-in-the-elementary-classroom/
Learning environments for students with disabilities may require physical accommodations to be made. This learning module presents a decision-making process for changing the classroom to accommodate the learning needs of a student with visual impairment and a student who is blind.
http://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/module/v01-clearview/challenge/#content
Appropriate learning environments can be found outdoors. At an Arizona elementary school, a horticulture program partnering with the National Park Service's First Bloom program includes elements of history and ethnobotany to study how plants have been used by local indigenous cultures:
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/news/cultivating-life-sonoran-desert/
