My first classroom came with two sets of Social Studies textbooks, neither published recently, and zero official curriculum. I had my standards and a plucky will to figure it out, but suddenly, I wasn’t sure that was enough. I needed better resources for teaching social studies. Even though one of my reasons for choosing this grade level (fifth), was getting to teach the American Revolution, that was months away, and in the immediate, I was left with a daunting question: How to teach social studies in an engaging way?
Much trial and error later, four things that I wish all elementary social studies curriculum had built in to ensure student engagement and retention of information.
1) Have kids teach each other.
My principal once walked into my room for an unplanned observation during social studies. It was loud, the kids were all over the room, everyone seemed to be doing something slightly different. “I will come back later when you are actually teaching” she said. I assured her that this was fine and this was how social studies normally looks in my classroom. (Spoiler alert: my end of year evaluation came back with the highest marks).
Most of our social studies units start with either a Jigsaw or a GoGoMo. These two protocols both center on the content being divided up between different students to study, and then having them teach it to each other. Here students are learning the content while also getting practice with some of our most critical 21st century skills, and limiting how much reading anyone has to do themselves.
2) Play Games
Yes, my kids love Kahoot, and bless those teachers who make their Kahoots available for the whole world so we don’t have to create our own, but I mean games that actually have kids using their hands and talking about the content.
For example in my geography vocabulary unit we play Four Corners (the academic version) where students go to the corner with the geographic feature they think would be most useful for a new civilization and then discuss why they chose that with the other people in their corner.
Matching games where students have to sort information into categories or create matches are my favorites. I have learned to make sure that students work on these in partnerships where at least one of them has solid cutting skills so they don’t spend the whole class just cutting out the cards.
My kids also LOVE Bingo for vocabulary or simple facts and dates like state capitals. I print blank cards and have them use their vocabulary lists to create their own cards.
3) Keep students appropriately challenged
We generally aren’t (and shouldn’t be) grouping students in social studies by academic levels, but it is still critical to engagement that students are appropriately challenged no matter where they are.
For activities and assessments, I try to give students options to work in the way that they feel most comfortable- for some that is writing, for others it is drawing, etc. We do a lot of group projects where I encourage students to divide up the work based on their individual strengths.
Ensuring all students engage with complex texts at their reading levels was the hardest parts for me. Sometimes I use video to level the playing field, but that can’t be for everything.
Instead, I used to spend hours cobbling together leveled content from multiple sources and different elementary social studies curricula. This took me forever, and resulted in homogenous groups, which wasn’t what I wanted either. When I started writing my own content to solve this problem, that was when I started thinking about starting a TPT store.
Now, I’m thrilled to save teachers this time by offering reading comprehension passages about social studies topics and multiple levels, like my Native American Cultural Regions passages. In my own classrooms, this means that when I do a GoGoMo or Jigsaw, the groups come out heterogenous even though the reading passages are tailored to each student’s reading level. How’s that for better resources for teaching social studies?
4) Teach with Projects
I’m not sure there is a subject that is more perfectly aligned to PBL than Social Studies. My colleague has a daughter in parochial school and last year she had the teacher known throughout the school as the most difficult. The poor girl spent all of social studies memorizing facts and completely nightly worksheets at home. I felt for her. Mom finally had to hire a tutor to get her through it all.
In my class, I get emails from parents about how excited their students are for their social studies projects, I’ve even heard my kids bragging about their different ideas to each other at recess. Kids are also more engaged in the research we do at the start of units because they trust that there will be a project at the end. For our Native Americans Unit, students make a digital book that gets shared with lower grades. For the 13 Colonies, students learned about the three different regions and then placed themselves in history designing their colonial home and soliciting “relatives” from Europe to join them. Perhaps most popularly, when we got to the American Revolution, students actually built a “road” to the Revolution with found objects. Students talk about these projects to the incoming 5th graders every year, and come back to my classroom from later grades still remembering the project, and the content.
To Sum it Up...
Social Studies Curriculum doesn’t have to be boring, and it doesn’t have to require you spending every waking moment on Pinterest. The best part of these strategies is that they apply to every unit. My students know we will start a unit with differentiated reading that they will then share with one another. They know we will be building to a project. They know they will have chances to review information through games. I also know that students will be engaged with their work during social studies so I will be able to check in with small groups or do formative assessments of their work and understanding. Hopefully these strategies help you do the same.
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