Meaningful, well-planned S.S. lessons

“What are the attributes of meaningful, well-planned social studies lessons?”

Before beginning this class and starting all the reading about integrating disciplines, I thought that the best and most efficient way to teach Social Studies would be through integration. With such limited time for teaching in the school day and so much to cover, it seems like integration is your best bet for teaching all of the subjects. To me, planning a thematic unit makes the most sense. With that, a teacher can plan ahead to incorporate each content area into one themed unit. That way the whole school day will (hopefully) flow smoothly and the students will be able to easily make connections between what they are learning for each content area.

Looking at Social Studies as a separate subject, I think it is important to make it interesting for the students. I personally do not remember much about social studies in elementary school. The one thing that stands out to me is that I received the Social Studies award in third grade, so I just automatically thought it was my favorite subject. Looking back, I realize that those awards are given to the students who didn't get the "Perfect Attendance Award" and also that my teacher was out half the year on maternity leave, so how well did she actually know my aptitude in Social Studies? That's it, that's all I remember about Social Studies, other than the textbooks were crazy-heavy and smelled funny. So, I think lessons need to be exciting, hands-on and they need to mean something to the students. If teachers know their students well enough, they should be able to design lessons in which students can connect personally to the content and get something meaningful out of it. Incorporating other subjects that students may enjoy more, such as visual arts, music or drama might help many students make that personal connection.

We have talked a lot about text books versus basal readers in our other classes, and while I think that text books do offer a lot of valuable fact-like information, students will not remember the information they get out of a text book. I think that doing a novel study to learn about a certain subject in Social Studies guarantees that the students will be more engaged in the reading and it will give their imaginations a chance to work with the historical facts, to act it out in their mind so they can commit it to memory their own way.

A good Social Studies lesson plan, much like any other lesson plan, needs to begin by grabbing the students attention and sucking them in. They need to see that what they are going to learn will be important and what they are going to be doing will be meaningful and interesting. The activities need to challenge the students to think and discuss their ideas, but not be so hard that it discourages them. The assessment needs to check that the student can apply the information that should have been learned.

My First Post!

So, this is my first post. Setting up the blog was easy, but finding Dr. Duncan's blog is proving to be a bit harder. So now our whole table is trying to figure it out. Now I think we (as a table) have figured it out! I am going to go try to figure out the rest of how to follow her. This is the end of my first post!