Great Depression

Hey everyone! I hope everyone is enjoying their week. Its time for another Through Time and Space Thursday. This week I have been thinking about students and social studies. There are so many students that only remember what we tell them about history long enough to take the test (if that long). Teaching history to young students is so hard because it is so many people, places, and dates that they just all run together.
As I have discussed before, I love social studies and history. I love teaching it in a way that students will not just remember history but enjoy learning about it. If students really get to experience the lessons then they are more likely to remember the information than if they just read about it.
One example for letting students experience a lesson is something I did during student teaching last year. While teaching about the great depression I did a lesson about life during the depression. I researched online and found that some students built their own Hoovervilles. So during my lesson my students split into families and we played a survival game type lesson. My student's "families" lost their homes and had to build a Hooverville to live in. We used actual cardboard boxes and newspaper. My students had a blast and it just helped all the information about that time in history for Americans make so much more sense.
What lessons like this have you done with your students? How do you feel about teaching social studies?

~Manda