Making Social Studies Come Alive

A collection of hands on learning activities with creative ideas that fit in nicely with alternative assessments.

Prepares readers to become high-quality humanities and social sciences educators for early childhood and primary contexts.

Contributors to this volume offer insights from the discipline of history about the nature of empathy and the necessity of examining perspectives on the past. On the basis of recent classroom research, they suggest tested guides to more robust teaching. The contributors insist that with experienced history and social studies teachers, students can learn many historical details and, with the use of empathy, develop deepened and textured interpretations of the history that they study.

Learn how to use role-plays to bring history and literature to life! When students take on the roles of historical or literary figures, they develop a greater understanding of characters’ identities and motivations, and are able to more deeply explore and reflect upon key issues and themes. In this new book from award-winning teacher David Sherrin, you’ll find out how this lively instructional format will make teaching a more immersive, interactive, and memorable experience for your middle school and high school students. The book includes: A clear how-to guide to get the most out of role-playing in your class; Ready-made units and lessons to get you started right away, complete with sample scripts, scaffolding worksheets, and assessment rubrics; Templates and step-by-step instructions to help you design your own role-plays. The pre-made units, which Sherrin spent years refining in his classroom, cover historical topics such as the rise of Nazi Germany and the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs. You’ll also find fun and interactive role-plays based on literary works like The Pearl and Fences. These lessons will help students at all ability levels to become better communicators, problem-solvers, and creative thinkers.

Jam-packed with classroom-tested, hands-on activities such as wondercircles, fan-fold books, paper-chain timelines, and more mapping and report writing ideas!

Making Connections in Elementary and Middle School Social Studies, Second Edition is the best text for teaching primary school teachers how to integrate social studies into other content areas. This book is a comprehensive, reader-friendly text that demonstrates how personal connections can be incorporated into social studies education while meeting the National Council for the Social Studiese(tm) thematic, pedagogical, and disciplinary standards. Praised for its eoewealth of strategies that go beyond social studies teaching,e including classroom strategies, pedagogical techniques, activities and lesson plan ideas, this book examines a variety of methods both novice and experienced teachers alike can use to integrate social studies into other content areas.

Teaching History with Museums provides an introduction and overview of the rich pedagogical power of museums. In this comprehensive textbook, the authors show how museums offer a sophisticated understanding of the past and develop habits of mind in ways that are not easily duplicated in the classroom. Using engaging cases to illustrate accomplished history teaching through museum visits, this text provides pre- and in-service teachers, teacher educators, and museum educators with ideas for successful visits to artifact and display-based museums, historic forts, living history museums, memorials, monuments, and other heritage sites. Each case is constructed to be adapted and tailored in ways that will be applicable to any classroom and encourage students to think deeply about museums as historical accounts and interpretations to be examined, questioned, and discussed.

This teacher-friendly resource provides practical arts-based strategies for classroom teachers to use in teaching social studies content. Overview information and model lessons are provided for each strategy and ideas are provided for grades K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12. The strategies addressed within the book allow teachers to make social studies instruction come alive and best meet students' needs.

In History and Imagination, elementary school social studies teachers will learn how to help their students break down the walls of their schools, more personally engage with history, and define democratic citizenship. By collaborating together in meaningful investigations into the past and reenacting history, students will become experts who interpret their findings, teach their peers, and relate their experiences to those of older students, neighbors, parents, and grandparents. The byproduct of this collaborative, intergenerational learning is that schools become community learning centers, just like museums and libraries, where families can go together in order to find out more about the topics that interest them. There is an incredible value in the shared and lived experiences of reenacting the past, of meeting people from different places and times: an authority and reality that textbooks cannot rival. By engaging elementary social studies students in living history, whether in the classroom, after school, or in partnership with local historical institutions, teachers are guaranteed to impress upon the students a special, desired understanding of place and time.

Both and invaluable resource and a how-to manual, this book is unlike others on the market. Written with the practicing teacher in mind, the book offers ten tested, varied, and refined simulations that will enliven a classroom in grades 7-12 without sacrificing content. The lessons will help a teacher teach concepts, material and skills more effectively.