Events Puzzle

A key concept for middle school social studies is understanding the cause and effect relationships between events.  I created a small exercise for my students to practice this skill for our unit on slavery.  I call these exercises Events Puzzles, though I'm sure I am not the first to come up with this.  The idea behind the exercise is very simple.  I gave my students 10-12 cards, each with a description of a historical event or fact related to slavery in the United States.  The cards were in a random order, but they all connected to each other in some way.  Students worked in groups to create a mind map with connecting words and arrows for the events.

It was interesting to see the different connections each group made and no two groups were the same.  Some students created a very methodical chain of events with no two events having more then one connection, while others had complicated webs with multiple connections for each event.

Rather then correcting the students puzzles, I had students wander around the room analyzing other groups puzzles for ideas.  Once they had seen each puzzle and recorded observations and ideas, they went back to their puzzle and made adjustments.  We had a discussion afterwords about why there were so many different ideas and if there was one correct way to do it.  We decided in the end that although some connections were wrong, there were many ways to solve the events puzzle.  It all depended on the connecting words.

I like these kinds of activities, because they really facilitate collaboration and problem solving.  Students learned from each other during the exercise and got a chance to review events we had studied and saw how they were connected.  I would love to find a way to expand on these kinds of exercises.  I think this would work well with Smart Boards or tablets (if only we had them!).

Here are the events I had my students make connections with.  It isn't a perfect list and I would be happy to hear suggestions of events that could be changed or added.

Events Puzzle