In the first article of this issue, “News-Group Fridays: Engaging Students in Current Events,” Natasha C. Murray-Everett and Erin Coffield describe how a teacher educator engaged pre-service teachers in a current event project. The authors describe how news groups were effectively used in a social studies methods course, as well as how a local teacher integrated and adapted news groups to help sixth grade students develop critical literacy skills and become more informed and engaged citizens. Erin M. Casey’s article, “What’s My Favorite Landmark? Investigating Pre-Kindergartener’s Interests…

Incorporating poetry into the social studies curriculum can help students develop reading and writing skills while building their content knowledge.

The authors describe five types of inquiry that keep students engaged, promote student agency, and meet the need of teachers for curriculum flexibility.   

Comparing questions from the 1920 Census and the 2020 Census can be a great jumping off point into a lesson on the importance of a national count and how Census questions reflect the prior decade.

A classroom examination of the featured historical article announcing North Carolina’s ratification of the Constitution can springboard into a lesson on federalism, the Bill of Rights, and the ratification process.

Decades of curriculum research have uncovered a persistent trend: white people are depicted as dominating the history of the United States, whereas communities of color and their experiences are omitted or misrepresented in social studies textbooks and curriculum standards. The message the resulting curriculum sends to children is that the United States is a country of white people, and people of color have little or no place in it. The author presents silenced-yet-powerful stories of three Americans—girls of Indigenous, Chinese, and Mexican ancestry—who fought for equal education in America…

Teaching a civil rights unit in the upper elementary grades can be difficult. Educators must sort through multiple resources, determine the quality and developmental appropriateness of the materials, synthesize and organize the resources into meaningful lessons, and teach the unit in the midst of pressures to minimize or eliminate social studies in deference to tested subjects. Many elementary teachers find this a daunting task, which they avoid. The authors suggest a ‚Äúdepth over breadth‚Äù model focused around children‚Äôs literature texts and primary sources. This article reviews selected…