Sweet Child O' the 80's

 

In our last class, groups presented their Decades Project for anyone who happened to pass through the lounge in Greenlawn, the education building.  As you can guess, I was part of the 80's group.  Quite possibly the most fun decade, in my biased opinion.  Though, I'm sure the 90's would have been a blast as that group got the chance to revisit their childhood!

For this project, we had to dress in clothing that either was from our decade, or resembled the clothing from our decade.  You can only imagine half of the stares we received in the parking lot, as we dragged all of our artifacts in... Especially if you have teased hair, black AND brown eyeshadow, and this dress.

 

 I can say many things about the 80's starting from music and ending with groceries.  I learned all of those things because of all of the research my group had done.  We were asked to approach this project as if we were doing this with students in the classroom; so naturally, our teaching practices kicked in and we wanted to know everything we could possibly retain about the 80's.

What I found interesting about this project was that there wasn't one table that had artifacts that I didn't recognize...all the way back to the 1950s.   The other section went as far back as the 1920s, and I still recognized the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that they had made!  What would we do without the PB&J sandwich?! This project taught me that we may grow out of trends, but there are still parts of our history that stay with us.  That, my friends, is why we teach social studies.  

[Other ideas I had for this project:  Hold the presentations on Halloween if you teach in a school that doesn't allow students to "Dress up for Halloween."  This way, they have a purpose for dressing up, it is educational, and you have some control over what their costume entails (ie. No blood dripping Halloween masks...).  Also,  these projects could be used as a thematic unit.  The students can do the projects, gather all of the random information, and present what they have learned.  Then, information centered around economics can be pulled from these projects (now prior knowledge) and used in future lessons.  The same can happen with technology.]