If you want students to get excited about learning a history lesson, just give Founding Father Benjamin Franklin a Twitter account.
So that’s exactly what Huebner Elementary School Librarian Natalie Watts did. She was dressed in her finest pantaloons, buckle shoes, bifocals and receding hairline wig to really get fifth-graders excited about history.
She asked students to imagine what it would have been like if Ben Franklin had a Twitter account. Then, they were tasked with deciphering his tweets to figure out what order they went in. They were laughing, they were engaged and they were learning.
“We can do timelines and talk about his major life events and put them in order, but doing that in a trendy way really gets them engaged,” said Watts. “They even corrected some of my hashtags. But it made a historical figure relatable. It brought Ben Franklin to life. They had to use critical thinking, technology and teamwork to finish this lesson. It was so fun watching them. They were having fun!”
Watts has been the librarian at Huebner for 16 years and loves working with the teachers to bring lessons from the classroom to life in her library.
Making learning fun #theNEISDway.
